When I'm not designing, I'm working with the violin, collaborating with current composers and artists across disciplines - dance, film, architecture, programming - to create experiential art works and performances lying between the classical and computational.
I've been playing since the age of 3, made my solo debut at age 6, and have been performing ever since, from Tanglewood, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, and Lincoln Center to the Oakland Space and Science Center, the Academy of Sciences, and NASA's Yuri's Night Festival. A classically trained violinist, I've studied at the SF Conservatory of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music, and in Paris, and studied electronic music and composition at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard's Center for New Music.
I have included videos from some of my recent projects:
FLOCK: A joint project with Andrew May, composer; Jodi Lomask, choreographer, and RJ Muna, film showcasing my music with a dance performed by members of the SF Ballet and other local dance companies. The music was based on a piece by Andrew May - "Singing Boxes" for violin and tape written in the 90's. Andrew and I collaborated on a reimagining of this original work, to create a flexible, live performance-based version, incorporating solo violin and real-time signal processing within a composed software framework. I recorded the score with Andy Hong at Kimchee Records in Cambridge, MA and co-produced the video.
Fish on a Line: An improvisation and collaboration with Anka Draugalates, composer; Jodi Lomask, choreographer; Mayuko Hosoai, dancer; and RJ Muna, filmmaker. The piece was part of Capacitor's show, Okeanos, which premiered at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.
K-Bow: As an early adopter of K-Bow technology and K-Bow artist, I created a short film for inventor Keith McMillen and his company KMI to show off the bow's bluetooth enabled capabilities, giving live performers and interactive media systems 8 feeds of real-time performance data.
Okeanos: A show created by the performance group Capacitor, Okeanos is a live multimedia experience inspired by the ocean. Featuring National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and "Living Legend" of ocean exploration, Sylvia Earle, as narrator and scientific advisor, the show takes the audience underwater to explore the life of a coral reef. I am a long-standing collaborator and artistic advisor of Capacitor, and I was a composer and artistic contributor for this production and a member of the cast, playing violin live on stage. We premiered at Fort Mason last winter and have more recently been a long-running show at Fisherman's Wharf for the last five months. Okeanos has been covered by Fast Company, KQED, Nature, and the Smithsonian.
Visit my website at julia-o.com to learn more.
