Joel Ong
Joel Ong is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, particularly with respect to sound and physical space. Ong’s work explores the way objects and spaces can function as repositories of ‘frozen sound’, and in elucidating these, he is interested in creating what systems theorist Jack Burnham (1968) refers to as “art (that) does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment”. A serial collaborator, Ong is invested in the broader scope of Art-Science collaborations and is engaged constantly in the discourses and processes that facilitate viewing these two polemical disciplines on similar ground. His graduate interdisciplinary work in nanotechnology and sound was conducted at SymbioticA, the Center of Excellence for Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia. Ong is currently Assistant Professor at the department of Computational Arts at York University in Toronto.
Residency: Getty PST ART 2024 X UCLA Art|Sci Center
Proposal
Cloud Atlas_beta, a speculative design installation, will occupy the EDA (Experimental Design Arts) and CNSI (California NanoScience Institute) exhibition spaces on UCLA’s campus.
Project Research
Sept 10th, 2021 | Ars Electronica, Sound of Atmosphere Day 3, Joel Ong: The Sound of Clouds and Other Sonic Memories
Since 2015, Joel Ong has been collecting sonic memories through interviews and casual conversations. As part of his residency with UCLA this summer, Ong turned his attention to sonic memories in the environment, and is collecting these in order to draw attention to fluctuations in the climate observed and remembered through the inter-subjectivities of a diverse group of interviewees. The archive of memories is then audiated/imagined as a musical composition through binaural recordings and electroacoustic processing of field sounds. Where appropriate, each interviewee also provides an image of his/her ears that are then sculpted as closely as possible in clay and included in a binaural recording system. Through this, his project asks – how do we hear through someone else’s ears the same way we may imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Might we develop a deeper responsibility to the environment through the conservation of sounds that may be lost, or never again heard because of noisy anthropogenic changes to our soundscapes? How might we attend to the affect within each instance of listening, and create transformative politics of listening?
July 1st, 2021 | Artist in Residence: Joel Ong, Ecologies and Resonances of Proximity
As the June / July Artist in Residence for Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption, Joel Ong will be discussing his latest work including the performance series void * ambience : Latency, which responds to the idea of the digital wilderness –the overabundance of online streams that we must filter and comprehend, and explore a common issues in everyday communication today – latency – as a compositional parameter.
Further Involvement: UCLA Art|Sci Center
July 29th, 2020 | UCLA Sci Art Summer Session Lecture and Workshop: Microbial Theater, with Mick Lorusso, Clarissa Ribeiro, and Joel Ong
Day 3 of the 2020 Sci Art Summer Session was spent looking at microbes and their diverse interactions and potentials. We learned about fungi from Kaitlin Bryson and did part 1 of the mycology workshop. Mick Lorusso and Clarissa Ribeiro took us into the microbiome and we learned about complex interactions in our bodies and how these invisible species might impact how we behave and feel. Then we all got to collaborate in our groups to make exquisite corpses which turned into some pretty amazing SciArt monsters.
May 2nd, 2019 | Sound + Science 2.0 Symposium
The UCLA Art | Sci Center + Lab proudly announces the Sound + Science Symposium 2.0 – a decade after the first gathering in March, 2009 (Sound + Science 1.0). Join us to in a 2-day symposium with sound artists, scientists and humanists exploring all kinds of vibrations, audible and inaudible. This extraordinary event will bring together leading figures to discuss the applications and implications of such research in relation to questions of culture, politics, history, environment, art, and music.
Day 1 will will feature the Artsmesh networked performance by Ken Fields connecting UC Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara, New Mexico (Andrea Polli), Canada (Joel Ong) and Harvestworks, NY (Gil Kuno). This will be followed by the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) with short talks by the symposium participants.
Nov 11th, 2018 | Conference: Taboo, Transgression, Transcendence in Art & Science, with Joel Ong, Victoria Vesna, Ioannis Bardakos, Linus Lancaster, Marta de Menezes, Robertina Sebjanic, and others
The third international interdisciplinary conference “Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science” will take place between November 11-13, 2018, in Mexico City, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Centro de Cultura Digital. Including theoretical and artwork presentations, TTT2018 continues to focus: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality – as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. Coordinated in partnership with the program of the FACTT 2018 – Festival Art & Science Trans-disciplinary and Trans-national – the conference is co-organized by the Research and Creation Group Arte+Ciencia, UNAM (Mexico), Arte Institute (USA), Cultivamos Cultura (Portugal) besides the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University (Greece).
Nov 6th, 2014 | Sound Art Installation with Joel Ong, Aisen Caro Chacin and the Art|Sci Collective, Bird Song Diamond: Secret Life of Birds
Aisen Caro Chacin, Joel Ong and the Art|Sci Collective joined the multi-year collaboration of Professor Victoria Vesna and evolutionary biologist Dr. Charles Taylor in this sound and art exhibition based on the NSF-sponsored research on Mapping Acoustic Sensor Array of Bird Communication Networks.
Secret Life of Birds built off of this idea and aimed to re-examine the bonds between humans and birds through the perspective of the birds. This ongoing project continues to see various disciplines of art and science converging to present Taylor’s research as a work of art.