ABOUT THE ARTISTS
About
Olivia Ting and Annette Jannotta are a hybrid artist-architect team exploring multi-sensory experiences within the threshold of science and art — creating site-specific installations that inspire connection and curiosity.
Olivia Ting
As a hard of hearing, accomplished musician and artist, Olivia Ting explores how dis-abilities can be positively reframed into super-abilities. Recently featured online at the San Francisco Exploratorium Museum website, Olivia’s short audio-visual film, Into Beethoven’s Soundbox, delves into channeling her experience of sound through the internal architecture of her piano. She envisions the intricate hardware of her piano as a surrogate for the dysfunctional cochlear within her own ear.
Olivia’s hearing disability has opened other sensory channels of understanding sound for her. What she does not hear, her body seeks to explain through visual cues, tactile sensations, and spatial relationships of her environment. The neuroplasticity of the brain is incredibly resourceful, capable of flowing around obstacles like water. Likewise, this mindset of seeking other sensory inputs serves to further enrich and expand one's perceptive universe.
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In addition to performance media, Olivia has been commissioned to create audiovisual narratives for museums, with a permanent exhibit in Oakland Museum of California. She and Annette had co-created Coalescence, a commissioned year-long installation gracing the entryway of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in the historic War Memorial Building.
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Click here to learn more about Olivia's work.
Annette Jannotta
Annette is an architect, visual artist and founder of Urban Shrine. Uniquely overlapping with Olivia’s sensory work, Annette has sound-motion synesthesia. For her, movement, especially in connection with light, translates in her brain as sound. This way of perceiving her environment has influenced how Annette approaches her work--textures, light, even furniture selected within a space, can be expressed and translated sonically.
Sensitive to how objects and our environments affect our emotions, Annette’s work focuses on experiences discoverable over time, to inspire engagement, ownership and transformation of both the artwork and the viewer.
A common thread with her work is to heighten multi-sensory connection and uplift emotion. She has created pieces for clients as diverse as Genentech, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Stanford University, and Seattle Children’s Research Institute. With a desire to expand community-building through art and design, Annette founded Urban Shrine, a collective of socially engaged participatory art projects weaving myth with modern emotional challenges, such as grief, comfort, inadequacy and hope.
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Follow these links to learn more about Annette's work.
