Kahionhatá:tye — Wampum as Relation across Land, Memory, and Computation — is a site-specific media artwork that brings Haudenosaunee understandings of the Grand River and wampum into active relation. For Haudenosaunee, the Grand River is a living corridor of law, memory, kinship, and continuance, while wampum operates as a material practice through which governance, responsibility, and collective memory are enacted. The project brings these systems together as interconnected forms of spatial intelligence, shaping how meaning circulates through land, water, material, and lived relation.
Kahionhatá:tye is a large-scale, site-specific projection artwork that brings data from the Grand River, user-generated beadwork patterns and unsupervised machine learning (ML) into active relation.
Installed at Chiefswood Park along the Grand River during the 2RO Media Festival, the work takes the form of an extended horizontal projection across the landscape, recalling the scale and movement of a wampum belt. Environmental data from the river and artist-trained datasets derived from Haudenosaunee wampum designs inform a custom land-based AI system that generates continuously shifting patterns of light. These patterns form, dissolve, and recombine over time, allowing river movement, wampum pattern vocabularies, and computational processes to circulate together. Through this ongoing interaction, Kahionhatá:tye presents wampum, water, and computation as co-present processes, emphasizing movement, relation, and continuity across land, memory, and technology.
IMAGE (main): Kahionhatá:tye Installation at Chiefswood Park, Six Nations of the Grand River; 2RO Media Festival 2025 / IMAGE (left): Kahionhatá:tye Installation at Chiefswood Park, Six Nations of the Grand River; 2RO Media Festival 2025
IMAGE (above): Kahionhatá:tye Installation at Chiefswood Park, Six Nations of the Grand River; 2RO Media Festival 2025