Oakland Festival of Immersive Arts

The Festival centers Oakland artists in a vivid and dramatic program that includes artists & projects from the wider Bay Area & from around the world. Five world premieres. More than twenty participating artists. At multiple locations throughout the downtown and free to the public. Two weekends: July 15, 16, 17 and July 23, 24, 25. This is the first year of this annual cultural platform. Programming: - What the Moon has Seen, an immersive music installation by Jonathan Crawford (composer, DJ, sound designer, member of IAA Creator’s Council) folding in sampled sounds of city and community. - AR Museum for the People, a mobile augmented reality walking tour highlighting mural art and the narrative history of the Black Panther Party. Artists: Damien McDuffie, Calvin Williams, Tim Bluitt, Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith - Unseen to Seen. Video sculpture in storefronts. Illumination of trauma. Ritual arts. Kimberlee Koym-Murteira, Sylvie Minot, Daniel Alexander Jones, Allison Pasquesi. - Craig Newswanger and Sally Weber are a collaborative team of artists based in Oakland. Craig’s Ray Lights provide markers for festival activities along the Broadway corridor. Sally’s Convergence of Unruly Outcomes is about persistence-of-vision: What we see when things are gone. - TIDES is a a video and photographic installation by Ian Winters exploring the rapidly changing tidelands of San Francisco Bay and neighborhoods that will be lost under rising waters. With a score by composer Wayne Vitale. In collaboration and cooperation with LEONARDO. - Luminous Waveforms: Illuminated, sculpted seating by Phil Spitler and Victoria Mara Heilweil, inspired by sound waves in the natural world. - Khôra is a new work by Can Büyükberber, a visual artist and director based in Turkey & graduate of San Francisco Art Institute. Khôra tests the borders of real and virtual space in this volumetric work with an accompanying soundscape. Like an animated hologram, it pushes the boundary of technological possibility. - The last weekend of the Festival will include a performance by Guillermo Galindo, celebrated Oakland composer, sound, visual artist. Galindo brings to the Festival Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles, performed by The Living Earth Show (Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews, with animations by Christoph Steger). Preceding the performance, a weeklong audio installation from Galindo features sonic devices built from items separated from migrants at the US/Mexico border.