Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Native artist Marlena Myles — who uses advanced virtual reality technology to tell traditional stories — has been awarded a $50,000 Arts+Tech Fellowship from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Myles, Spirit Lake Dakota, is one of five innovative artists who are working at the nexus of art and technology.
SUPPORT INDIGENOUS JOURNALISM. CONTRIBUTE TODAY.
“The intersection of art and technology enables new possibilities for storytelling and collaboration,” Koven Smith, senior director/arts at the Knight Foundation, said in a statement. “Across disciplines, this year’s fellows invite us to examine lesser-told histories, forge new ways of relating to one another, and envision alternative futures.”
The other 2023 Fellows are Yale faculty member American Artist, co-director of the School for Poetic Computation; Kara Güt, a multidisciplinary artist; Leo Castañeda, a multimedia artist and video game designer; and The Institute of Queer Ecology.
Myles, a self-taught artist who began using computers at age 12, has created site-specific augmented and virtual reality animation as a means of storytelling and for expanding understanding of Native cultures and histories.
She said her work allows her to keep Dakota oral traditions alive through new technologies.
Her most recent artwork, “The Dakota Spirit Walk,” is a permanent, digital installation that uses geolocation, audio, and 3-D animation to guide users through encounters with spirits overlaid on the site of the historic Dakota village of Kaposia.
The art installation is on the 27-acre Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary near the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The installation features augmented-reality Dakota spirits — Grandmother Earth, thunder beings, water serpents and Grandfather Stone — who share history, mischief, warnings, and wisdom. Visitors download a free app which brings stories to life as they walk along the trail.
She is also planning more projects in Minnesota, and has an upcoming exhibit with five new artworks. The “Dakota Sacred Hoop Walk is planned for June 25 in the Harrison Sculpture Garden in Chaska, Minnesota, where Myles will give a talk and then lead a tour. At the conclusion of the walk, a celebration will feature Native arts and crafts, food, storytelling, and performances.
Patterns and designs
Myles said she approaches “land as data,” with experiential works that allow audiences to view land from a Native perspective and be immersed in Dakota worldviews. She has also drawn and printed Dakota maps of the Minnesota region, featuring Dakota geographical names that show Dakota culture and communities in the present.
“When I was a kid, my mom got us a computer in the late ‘90s and I just got into coding and doing digital art, before it was really popular,” Myles told ICT. “Every time there’s a new program out, I had to self-teach. People might think it sounds surprising to be self-taught, but if I went to college, by the time they would teach me a program, something new was out already and what they were teaching was outdated.”
She has been making digital art for 20 years now and finds that apps on the phone allow for more advanced creating.
“I started augmented reality about four or five years ago,” Myles said, “but it wasn’t really accessible to people yet, until apps like Pokemon Go came out and they were using the AR technology on phones and people started to find ways to make it so that artists can build their artworks in the app.”
Myles has now gone completely digital, a clean, fast way for her to work.
“I normally do it all on my computer and Adobe Illustrator,” she said. “I always create my work digitally. I can do a job with paper, but I just skip that step now. I took art class in 8th grade; I spent a lot of my time taking music classes and learning classical compositions. I think mentally there are comparisons between music and art, the concepts and the layering of sound can apply to the layering of colors. It’s a different route to be taught as an artist; I didn’t take too many art classes.”
Music has a basis in numerology, and Myles was advanced in math in school.
“It’s all patterns,” she said. “My brain just naturally gets into mathematics and that helps with music. And then the artwork I create, I do a lot of patterns on computers, plus creativity with the math, it’s a way for me to challenge myself. I was always good at art, but it didn’t really seem like a challenge. I just kept it as a hobby. And then music was actually more challenging. So, going to college, did I want to practice five times harder than somebody who gets it naturally? I’ve made music my hobby nowadays and art is what I do professionally.”
’Good power from culture’
The imagery in her art arose from her culture and her family, she said.
“Growing up, my mom always did beadwork, and she would sell her beadwork whenever my brothers needed new shoes for basketball, or we needed school supplies,” she said. “I always saw art as being a way you can support yourself, and art has been passed down throughout the women in my family. My mom always encouraged me to create my own Native art how I want. She encouraged me to do digital art, and I didn’t have to learn beadwork if it didn’t come naturally to me.”
Although Myles wasn’t interested in doing beadwork, her mother shared the creative process with her.
“She showed me how she creates her patterns and her designs,” she said. “She has a hummingbird design that she let me use in my work now. So even though I’m not doing what people think of when you think of Native art, it’s honoring Native artwork always. We’ve always been innovative people and I try to tell people that. They don’t think digital art is what a Native artist should be doing. But any time we get new materials we’ve always incorporated it into our cultures and used it to tell our stories. I feel I’m still just following tradition of being innovative.”
Myles said augmented reality lets her create art using the land as teacher.
“It lets the world see the place through our eyes, through a Native person’s eyes,” she said. “When we say something is sacred, I think we understand easily, but it might not be for other people from other cultures. This AR makes them go to a site, place themselves in that surrounding and then they see these stories being told orally and visually through their phones. I just thought it was a great way to immerse people in my culture and the way we see things. And with AR you don’t need to ask permission to create it, since it’s not disturbing anything. It’s not physically there. A lot of my sacred sites we don’t own anymore, this lets me create our stories in those places, and it’s permanent and accessible.”
One irony she acknowledges is that elders are always telling younger people to get off their phones and go outside.
“This lets people take their phones and go outside with technology,” she said. “I’ve had people who brought their whole family there, and all their kids are standing next to spirits that you meet under the Dakota Spirit Walk. It’s really cool to see young kids learn about our culture, and then have fun with it, too. I think in school kids learn just the bad things that happened to us throughout history. They don’t really get to see the good power from culture.”
Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute $5 or $10 today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT’s free newsletter.