Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Artist Talk with Marilène Oliver and Scott Smallwood
Sound Studies Institute, 3-47 Arts Building
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Read more about the exhibition Fountains of Data: Evocation Zones, a virtual reality (VR) artwork that explores the evolving landscape of healing in the digital age.
Marilène Oliver works at a crossroads somewhere between new digital technologies, traditional print and sculpture, her finished objects bridging the virtual and the real worlds. She works with the body translated into data form in order to understand how it has become ‘unfleshed’, in the hope of understanding who or what it has become. Oliver uses various scanning technologies such as MRI, CT, and PET to reclaim the interior of the body and create works that allow us to materially contemplate our increasingly digitized selves.
Marilène Oliver was born in the UK in 1977 and studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and then at the Royal College of Art where she obtained an MPhil with the practice based research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’ on the use of medical imaging in contemporary art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, and North America in both private and public galleries, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy (UK), MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece) and Kunsthalle Ahlen (Germany), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada). Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Knoxville Museum of Art.
Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and sound performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and sonic improvisation. He designs experimental electronic instruments and software, as well as sound installations and site-specific performance scenarios. Important to his process is exploring the subtleties of sonic texture through gradual transformations of timbre, particularly with sounds that may have originated from specific recordings of objects or spaces. His compositional and improvisational work makes use of space explicitly, and often involves multiple channel environments, found sounds, and non-conventional instrumentation. He works in a variety of sound and music genres, including instrumental concert and chamber music, electroacoustic music, sound art and installation, improvisatory performance, and more recently, audio game development. His work has been presented worldwide, including recent presentations at SARC in Belfast, the Issue Project Room in NYC, the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, the The Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. His recorded work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Wowcool, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Dead Definition Records.
In addition to his artistic work and research, Smallwood has been an educator in music composition and technology in the US and Canada for over 25 years. He holds music degrees from Seattle Pacific University, Miami University, Peabody Conservatory, and Princeton University, where he also held postdoctoral research associate position, working with the legendary Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). From 1997 until 2003, he worked as a studio engineer, faculty member, and technical director in the electronic arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he developed a continuing interest in collaboration with artists in other media. He is currently the Director of the Sound Studies Institute at the University of Alberta, where he serves as a Professor of music composition and technology.
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