Thank you for joining us at OFIA 2022!

Oakland Festival of Immersive Arts (Biennial)

Premiered in 2022 / Upcoming in 2024

A FREE festival celebrating Oakland's communities, cultures, history, & art. Our first OFIA in 2022 was a big success — to sign up for news and announcements about OFIA 2024, click here.

"Immersive art” is a term that carries very specific cultural associations for audiences at present. With so many digitally projected attractions now using the word in the title, varying vastly in quality, you’re forgiven if your first thought is one of those experiences. The nonprofit Immersive Arts Alliance has helped many in the Bay Area see beyond those kinds of pop experiences with their emphasis on site-specific, community generated art ... the work can be truly engulfing."

Read the article: New Oakland festival explores the many definitions of immersive art

Tony Bravo,

The San Francisco Chronicle

Presented at the Festival:

Oakland artist Guillermo Galindo performs Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles

Bay Area-based composer, DJ, sound designer, and member of IAA Creators Council Jonathan Crawford brings to the Festival What the Moon has Seen, a 360-degree immersive listening experience featuring sampled spoken word from Bay Area youth.

Sally Weber and Craig Newswanger are a collaborative team of artists at Resonance Studio based in Oakland. Convergence of Unruly Outcomes (pictured above) is inspired by the turbulence of chaos. Revealing the unpredictable, new patterns continually emerge as the eye captures traces of flickering light sweeping through the air immersing the viewer in trails of light in motion, and bursts of light from other worlds. Music composed by Clark Suprynowicz.

Luminous Waveforms, a collaboration between Victoria Mara Heilweil & Phil Spitler is inspired by sound waves in the natural world. An innovative and imaginative interpretation of seating comprised of parametrically designed, sculpted benches, the artwork transforms the mundane experience of sitting into an uplifting and creative experience.

Damien McDuffie’s AR Museum for the People is a mobile augmented reality walking tour highlighting the narrative history of the Black Panther Party through mural art located both inside Festival partner Oakstop’s storefront at 17th and Broadway and at Black Panther monuments around the Downtown Oakland corridor. Click here using your phone to download the Black Terminus AR app. Artists: Damien McDuffie, Calvin Williams, Tim Bluitt, Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira’s Unseen to Seen, developed over the first five months of 2022 through intensive community engagement, chronicles experiences of trauma and grieving into a visually ambitious storefront and gallery exhibit amplifying a communal expression of hope. Artists: Kimberlee Koym-Murteira, Sylvie Minot, Daniel Alexander Jones, Allison Pasquesi.

Can Büyükberber’s Khôra is a volumetric audiovisual installation using scrim, haze, two-channel video projection and accompanying audio.

TIDES is 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. An audiovisual evocation of climate change in our backyard, it is presented in collaboration and cooperation with LEONARDO. TIDES features a score by composer Wayne Vitale.

Look out for Craig Newswanger’s Ray Lights installed at each Oakland Festival location facing the street. Ray Lights are unique, colorful, radiant orbs that respond to the sounds around them (footsteps, talking, clapping, shouting and singing) by changes in color and patterns. Each Ray Light marks a Festival site.