Her work integrates cultural and intellectual history to illuminate topics such as indigenous (data) sovereignty, indigenous legality, and the movement of indigenous language archives into digital mediums extending kānaka maoli traditional methods of organizing knowledge into the 21st century.
n 2015, Arista created the Facebook group 365 Days of Aloha, a repository of images and translations that provided deep interpretive dives into mele (song) and oli (chant), recovering Hawaiian intimacy from surface pop culture understandings currently in circulation.
Currently, Arista is advocating for the continuance of Hawaiian culture and knowledge systems through ethically engineered open-source digital mediums. She co-authored the award- winning essay Making Kin with the Machines on indigenous AI, published by MIT Press in 2020.
