While ROYGBIV limits our eyes, and 20Hz-20kHz limits our ears, nothing limits our minds alone. But a mind with limited senses has limited reach, and so I create synesthetic experiences to extend this reach to eschew an emerging bodily awareness over the confluence of energy and matter.
Synesthesia, or the melding of senses, can be harnessed as a powerful tool for dilating human perception by orders of magnitude. Simply put, to multiply the senses is to turn up the volume on human perception. In doing so, hidden geometries are unleashed.
My practice is as much about making art as it is companion research to the physical sciences. I rely on real-world data to translate senses to carve out unexpected shapes that form the invisible threads that weave us together.
It is said that knowledge cannot become wisdom without first undergoing a profound metamorphosis. If the sciences uncover the ore of knowing, and the spiritual traditions carry the pebbles of wisdom, then the arts are the polishing stones that refine ore into pebble through the alchemy of translating knowing into feeling.
Millenia ago Pythagoras championed a metaphysical worldview titled The Music of the Spheres, where he intuited that the nature of the universe was somehow bound to the musical principles that make strings vibrate. Today, physicists agree. We live in a vibrational universe. Whether made of strings that vibrate at the Planck scale on
6-dimensional manifolds (M-theory), or of loops in an oscillating spacetime chain (Loop Quantum Gravity), we have returned full-circle to the notion that our reality is one of vibration. Our world is an instrument for producing impossible music.
It is the raison d'etre of the artist to play that instrument, to pull harmony from the spectra of the visible and tangible.
STATEMENT
BIOGRAPHY
David Ostro is a new media artist and composer based in Oakland CA. A dual-citizen of Switzerland and the US, Ostro studied at Princeton University, RISD, and 3D Technical Institute before receiving a BA with honors in Fine Art and Philosophy from Vassar College and an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. He is the director of DAOLAB Studios, an art studio specializing in commissioned art projects incorporating emerging technologies for private clients, companies, public institutions, and municipalities.
David Ostro is the founder of TonalTotem, an art fabrication company providing custom solutions for artists and designers that combine the tools from the VFX and digital fabrication industries and the CEO of ArtArrays, a scientific and medical animation house.
With 15 years experience as a public artist, Ostro has produced works for private, institutional, municipal, non-profit, and federal clients at scales ranging from several feet to several hundred feet, with budgets from $50,000 - $3,000,000. Clients include: The National Park Service, Heartland Payment Systems, the City of Trenton, Ellarslie Museum, the Anchor House Organization, The Give Something Back Foundation, the Illinois-Michigan Canal Corridor Association, and DP Bioventures, et al.
David Ostro's awarded work has been exhibited across the US and Europe since 2006. He has exhibited at The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C), the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (Peekskill NY), the Brooklyn International Museum of Computer Art (Brooklyn NY), Hampton Art Fair (NY), Pulse Art Fair (NYC), the Knockdown Center (Brooklyn NY), Rooftop Films Festival (Brooklyn, NY), Allegra LaViola Gallery (NYC), and Thompson Giroux Gallery (Chatham, NY), et al.
David Ostro's work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, ABC News, The Spur Literary Journal, and the Herald News. Ostro is the recipient of several fellowships and awards such as the Honorary Achievement Award from Princeton University Department of Linguistics and the shared the Illinois American Society of Landscape Architects (ILASLA) Merit Award with the Hitchcock Design Group for his public art commission Link.
CV available upon request