Biography
Oliver Hockenhull works in film, video, hyper media installations, writing, and design. He is a documentarian, screenwriter, communication theorist, stand-up philosopher, essayist and lecturer, and has taught at Northwestern University in Chicago.
His films are iconoclastic, visionary meals spiced by an intimate, poetic, and enlightening perspective into the complexity of the issues and subjects under examination. He has concentrated on pivotal subjects: the social and intellectual import of the eminent writer, Aldous Huxley; an experimental film essay on evolution featuring Richard Dawkins (and the gorillas of the London Zoo); an essay on ‘the built environment’ extending from the early works of Mies van der Rohe to the steps of the Burning Ghats of Varanasi; an installation that questions ‘chance‘ — as quantum indeterminate noise — to edit film; a feature comedy on Shabbatai Zevi, ‘the other’ great Jewish Messiah... the preceding a sampling of the artist’s creative entanglements.
His films have shown at such festivals and venues as the: International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, Netherlands; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Festival Internacional de Arte Experimental, Bilbao, Spain; Sao Paulo International Film Festival, Brazil; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Economie Zero, Paris; Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Switzerland; Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia; Vancouver International Film Festival (finalist for the NFB Documentary Award); the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Chicago International Film Festival, and others. His works have also been broadcast on Canadian and European television.
As a member of WebWeavers Network Society, Oliver contributed to the online launch of one of the first cultural websites in Canada, and his early and groundbreaking hypertext documents have been used in courses at: the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities; "Tech-Sci Culture" at the University of California, Santa Barbara; University of Iowa; Victoria University (NZ); the Rensselaer Tech. Institute, New York State; and at the Institute for Social Theory at Keele University, UK.
Oliver has also been deeply involved in the study, theory, and application of new media imaging and authoring technologies, and has been a research associate with The Centre for Image and Sound Research in Vancouver and a director/resident at The Banff Centre for the Arts.
Industry Expertise (3)
Fine Art
Internet
Motion Pictures and Film
Areas of Expertise (2)
Film
Documentaries
Education (3)
Canadian Film Centre: Film Writing 1995
Simon Fraser University: B.A., Communication & Film 1986
Banff Centre for the Arts: Director/Producer 2000
- Filmmaker/Resident, Co-Production, Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada (various projects -associated -p/t)
Social