OTEKH projects are Indigenous-led research-creation initiatives that bring together land-based practice, media arts, computation, and emerging technologies.
Our projects take shape through collaboration with communities, artists, students, and knowledge holders, guided by place, process, and responsibility. Across installations, workshops, digital environments, and material practices, OTEKH engages technology as relational—made and used in dialogue with land, culture, and lived experience—shaped through sustained exchange, reciprocity, and shared commitments that root the work in accountability, care, and long-term responsibility to the territories and communities that make it possible.
IMAGE (main): Otkonkénhte (F.I.R.E.—Fire/ Intelligence/ Relation/ Earth) A research-creation project that brings together clay, fire, sensors, and computation through site-based pit firing practices. IMAGE (inset): Otkonkénhte, student project from pit fire at the MOA / IMAGE (lower): pit fire event at the Abundant Intelligences AGM. October 2025
Landmarks: Spatial Storytelling, Land, Art & Community
LandMarks is a studio-based course grounded in land-based practice and collaborative artmaking, where students develop interdisciplinary projects through site-responsive research, material exploration, and embodied storytelling. Guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and making, the course emphasizes collective process, engagement with place, and the development of contemporary art practices attentive to land, history, and lived experience.
Otkonkénhte (F.I.R.E.—Fire/ Intelligence/ Relation/ Earth)
Otkonkénhte (FIRE) is an ongoing, site-specific prototype land-based AI ecology that brings together clay material practice, traditional pit firing methods, environmental sensing technology, and unsupervised machine learning as a place-responsive artwork/event at the Lawson Site, where handmade clay forms, fire, and computational processes unfold in active relation.
Kahionhatá:tye: Wampum as Relation across Land, Memory, and Computation
Kahionhatá:tye is an ongoing, site-specific prototype land-based AI ecology developed at Six Nations of the Grand River and presented in the 2RO Media Festival, using small-scale unsupervised machine learning with data collected along the Grand River, combined with user-generated beadwork and realized as a place-responsive projection installation at Chiefswood Park.
Abundant Intelligences / Haudenosaunee POD at Otekh Labs
Abundant Intelligences is an Indigenous-led, international research program that brings together artists, researchers, technologists, and community partners to conceptualize, design, develop, and deploy Artificial Intelligence grounded in Indigenous Knowledge systems, emphasizing relational approaches to intelligence, place, and responsibility.