OTEKH develops Indigenous-led research-creation projects that explore AI as a relational, land-based practice.

Developed at the Lawson Site in the Dish with One Spoon territory, Otkonkénhte (F.I.R.E.) engages a place long understood by Onkwehonwe as a centre of settlement, making, exchange, and governance along the Thames River watershed. The project unfolds through community-based clay work using local materials, pit firing practices, environmental sensing, and a custom unsupervised AI system, allowing material, elemental, and computational processes to operate in active relation. Clay forms produced through collective making are 3D scanned and brought into the AI system, where they are continuously recombined and transformed in response to real-time thermal data from the firing process. The Lawson Site’s layered histories—held within its landforms, material traces, and ongoing stewardship—shape how the project understands intelligence, transformation, and continuity, situating technological processes within place-based practices that emphasize relation, responsibility, and ongoing exchange among earth, fire, air, water, and human and more-than-human actors.

IMAGE (main): Otkonkénhte at MOA 2025 showing pit fire with sensors/ IMAGE (left): Leroy Little Bear holding vessel from pit fire at AbINT AGM 2025.