allisonHOLT | WINTER 2015: Oilly Oowen... at the Smithsonian?

The tail-end of 2014 had more than the usual in store.  At the top of the year, I give you an overview in brief:

Dear Friends, Happy 2015!!!  I hope all of your holidays were sublime, and that your year unfolds with excitement and love. I am thrilled to announce that, on 12.30.2014, I became a finalist for a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.  Douglas Herman, Senior Geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian, nominated me this fall so that we might collaborate on new media versions of my interpretations of Javanese cosmology.  Really, if you're reading this right now please know that your support is and has been instrumental in achieving this phenomenal honor.  Your thoughts are tangibly felt.  Thank you!! It’s also very exciting to have this same work included in Living With Endangered Languages In The Information Age, curated by Hanna Regev, and it has already earned some very nice press.  The show opens this Saturday, January 10th, at Root Division.  I would love to see you. This fall, I left Djerassi Artist Residency with a new videosculpture series, which I test drove in Mutable Commute, an expanded cinema performance with Scott Stark (12.13. 2014, Other Cinema, SF, CA).  In November, our dual-16mm film performance, Nocturnal Symmetries, also featured in Scott Stark's retrospective, More Than One Way To Find Out at Anthology Film Archives (NYC). Post-Djerassi, surprise events led to the immediate re-relocation of OOwen Labs: we are now perched just off of lovely Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA. Again, as always, thank you all for reading and for your incredible support. I hope to see you real soon!

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The Minerva Foundation

Time is cramming itself into an infinitely small space at the moment, but I still think I'll be attending this Conference of Neuroaesthetics next week:

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allisonHOLT | SUMMER 2014 : Oilly Oowen at Djerassi

Dear Friends,

This missive comes to you from OOwen Labs' new home on Oakland's 5th Avenue marina, where things remain at full steam. I am currently psyching up for a September Djerassi Artist Residency: I’ll be experimenting with projection mapped video on objects and materials– scientific glass, vapors, liquids, crystals– to create models of multi-dimensional reality and human consciousness. It was incredibly gratifying last month to see Andreas Siagian and Budi Prokosa there, my Javanese nominees for the inaugural art-science residency!

If you would like to help make this rare time at Djerassi possible for me, I welcome support of every stripe right here. With my deepest thanks, I hope to bring some excellent work to fruition.

CHOICE NEWS:
06 + 12.2014, Scott Stark + Oilly Oowen: our show at Austin's New Media Art + Sound Summit was a GAS, and Craig Baldwin has invited us to Other Cinema in December: The Texas Kick-Ass Sampler Show kicks off 30 years! of Artist Television Access.

06.2014, Bay Area Currents: Although Hypercube No. 1 was selected for this exhibition, I opted to premiere it alongside the full body of work it belongs to. More on this below.

11.2014, Mobius, Boston: This longstanding experimental art org is being very inticing at the moment. We are working on a November exhibition to premiere the fruits of my time at Djerassi.

Fall 2014, UCLA: Very excited to present to Victoria Vesna's class in the Art-Sci Department!

Spring 2015, Stanford: As part of a year-long event series at Stanford Art Institute, I've been invited to speak at a special LASER (Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous), "Imagining the Universe."

2015, Optic Flare, San Francisco: This experimental media collective-- Scott Stark, Kerry Laitala and yours truly-- has been hard at work all year on The City Luminous, a commemoration of the pioneering light shows at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. We're creating a series of projected light and sound installations, performances, screenings, and lectures in partnership with The Exploratorium, California Historical Society and Insight Digital, that will include The Beginning Was The End. SF in 2015 will be SPECTACULAR.  

Thank you all for your support and I can't wait to see you out there.

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What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Jane Winderen answers Thomas Nagel by making audible the inaudible.

"Even with fancy Hi-Fi equipment, the weak link is often our ears and their limited 20Hz-20,000Hz hearing range. As pointed out by Motherboard, artist Jane Winderen wants you to get a feeling for what it's like to be a whale or bat with her "Out of Range" album. To do that, she used special equipment to record bat echolocation signals, marine vocalizing and other sub- and ultrasonic sounds from glaciers, oceans, and forests. From there, she slowed frequencies as high as 100KHz until they became audible, then mixed them with other exotic sounds that are within our hearing range. The end result (below) is hypnotic 40 minute recording of sounds that normally pass you right by."
~Steve Dent, Engadget

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allisonHOLT | SPRING 2014

It's been so long since my last post I'm just going to let this new news update do the talking:

Dear Friends,

I hope that 2014 has been treating you all just right! As for moi, I am shoehorning this late Spring dispatch into an already extremely busy year…

In The Beginning Was The End news, I have just been advanced to the next round of jurying for Bay Area Currents 2014, at Oakland’s Pro Arts gallery, and will be doing a studio visit with the brilliant Dena Beard of the Berkeley Art Museum shortly. VERY exciting. In April, I presented TBWTE at an Anthropology of Consciousness conference in Portland, and at the fantastic 20^th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference at the University of Arizona. Engaging research on quantum physics, neurology and brain imaging, cutting edge debate between thinkers like Donald Hoffman, Daniel Dennett, and Alison Gopnik… I was invited to present again at the Science and Nonduality Conference this coming Fall in San Jose, but first, in May, I’ll bring TBWTE to Margaretha Houghwout’s Visual Culture and Technology: History of New Media course as a visiting artist at UC Santa Cruz. Stay tuned…

Back in January, the inimitable Scott Stark and I collaborated on an expanded cinema performance at Shapeshifters Cinema for an unbelievable, standing room only audience. Our dual 16mm projection piece, Nocturnal Symmetries (sound by yours truly, using field recordings by Byram Abbott), was performed again live at the 2014 Crossroads Film Festival here in San Francisco, but hey, see it in Wisconsin! (before it secedes), at the upcoming Milwaukee Underground Film Festival juror’s screening! or Chicago’s Nightingale Cinema! This June, I’ll be heading out to Austin to do the full show at the New Media Art + Sound Summit (support NMASS here!), and I am more than honored to be collaborating with such a masterful and thoroughly cool human being.

One of my heroes, cognitive scientist Piero Scaruffi, invited me to return as a LASER speaker (Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous) in June at UC Berkeley, but as this date coincides with NMASS I will be announcing my 2015 talk soon. Likewise, Counterpath Press in Denver, CO approached me to do a solo thing there this Spring, but this, too, is being moved into the future. More to look forward to.

Among several Springtime screenings, I had the pleasure of participating in the 2014 World Water Day Symposium, both at Artist Television Access in The Matter of Water, and at Oakland's MilkBar in Hydrologies + History: Water + Memory, and in ACRE TV's Test Patterns at Mana Contemporary in Chicago.

As always, thank you incredible people for reading, and for forever fueling my fires.

Thine true,
Allison

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Cash from Color, Light, Motion

Very excited about this:The David Bermant Foundation at UCLA has deemed it fit to fund the artist known as Oilly Oowen, and the synchretic, idiosyncratic project entitled The Beginning Was The End. Some projects, like this one, take years to complete; at this point, you, dear reader, may even be grateful for the support these very generous dollars bring toward getting this lovely blimp off the ground in 2014.

The Foundation "... is devoted to fostering the efforts of artists working with non- traditional materials. These materials include physical sources of energy, light and sound, which are used in works that question and extend the boundaries of the visual arts." Mr. Bermant sounds like he was an interesting chap.

Huge thanks to my friend John Hood down at Hancock College for recommending me, and to my fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas.

It's an Oowen-elevating, even levitating, situation.

   
 

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Messieurs... C'est L'heure!

Absinthe Dream:

Last night I walked into a room full of people and somehow started feeding back.
Everyone covered their ears and looked at me in horror.
Me: "What-at-at?? UHWUHWUHWUHWUUUH..."

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