Meet Olive Kimoto | Artist Dialogue
August 09, 2025
As part of our Embodied Frequencies program from August 15—August 16, we spoke with multidisciplinary artist Olive Kimoto about the unseen forces that shape her work; spanning sound, ritual, and speculative ecologies. Read the full conversation below.
6-channel audio via plastic speakers on decomposing granite | Ecology of the Edge at Human Resources, Los Angeles • 2019
Resonance in the Non-Age frames nature as an archive, not only of ecological memory, but what’s lost as we grow closer to symbolic representations of nature rather than nature itself. Can you speak to your observation of that shift, and why it felt important to share through your practice?
I still remember the first time I saw green, rolling hills in real life as a kid. My first thought was: “Wow. It’s just like the Windows XP wallpaper!!!”
As technology increasingly mediates our experience of nature, something is lost, and I don’t just mean biodiversity or ecosystems. Nature becomes symbolic, aestheticized, flattened, rather than lived, embodied, and reciprocal. I wanted to explore that rupture: how ecological memory gets displaced or stored in manmade vessels—devices, screens, media—and what still hums beneath its surface. What does it mean to inherit a memory that’s been digitized in archives architected by our own destruction? How does memory flow differently through a body than through a machine?
Duet For Divine Machines at MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles • 2023
In Duet for Divine Machines, which you shared at MOCA, you contrast Buddha Machines (looping fragments of Buddhist chant) with your live voice. When does technology become more than an instrument in your work? When does it start to become a collaborator?
For me, it becomes a collaborator when it carves out space for itself and introduces its own essence, perspective and lineage—something beyond myself that I have to respond to. Buddha boxes are prayer machines, so they didn’t feel like recordings or backing tracks. They have more presence, like conduits transmitting from the disembodied and unearthly. My voice wasn't there to lead, but to join in, and that tension created something more alive than if I were simply using them as tools. It’s like this third presence starts to emerge, something between machine and body, and that’s the moment you realize that it has become co-creation.
Your practice spans DJing, performance, installation, design, and digital work. How have you woven ecological frameworks and ancestral-based memories across those disciplines? Has that intersection always been clear, or something that evolved over time?
It definitely wasn’t always clear. Early on, I was just following instinct and what poured out of me with each medium. I thought of myself more like a prism that was filtering something inside of me and emitting different colors from each facet of my practice. Over time, I realized that whether I was composing music or making visual work, I was reaching for the same thing: a way to touch the invisible. Now, I don't see myself as fragmented points of light scattered across disciplines. Instead, I think of it as tuning into a certain frequency and letting them express themselves through whatever medium is most resonant. It’s less about representation, and more about channeling a kind of attention.
You’ve spoken about building new mythologies through your work. Are there particular mythologies you’re trying to channel, or any you find yourself in the process of working through?
I think I’m less interested in referencing fixed mythologies and more drawn to the act of myth-making itself as a way of metabolizing history, human imagination, yearning, and grief. Lately, by way of my ancestry, I've been working through Ryukyuan cosmology.
If you’re not familiar, the Ryukyuans are an Indigenous people from the southern islands of Japan, with a worldview that feels deeply resonant to me—not in a strictly traditional sense, but as a living inheritance that keeps resurfacing. It’s a cosmology where spirit isn’t separate from the material, and memory lives in the deep-time of land, body and dreams.
Not only is it an oral tradition, passed down without a formal written language, but Ryukyuan belief is also matrilineal. Women in the family serve as conduits between worlds, holding knowledge received through dreams, intuition, and ancestral transmission. I never got to meet any of the women on my Japanese side of the family before they passed, though, and I think that’s where a lot of my interest in myth-making comes from: a longing to connect with something felt but unnamed, inherited but unspoken.
What self-practices do you return to when you’re in a creative block?
For starters, I keep Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” on my desk as my little lateral thinking oracle. On the digital side, it might look like falling into a Wikipedia wormhole, spending hours on Are.na, or searching up keywords on Jstor. Then there’s the embodied: going to the forest to photosynthesize, playing whatever comes to mind on my piano, watering my backyard garden, or cooking a meal entirely off vibes. These are all small acts of anti-productivity—turning my outward moving spiral inwards, and opening my perception to find new dialogues of curiosity to explore.
Is there a piece of media, theory, or question that has been shaping your work lately?
Lately I’ve been diving deeply into techno-animism—the idea that digital systems can hold or transmit spirit. It fits perfectly into Ryukyuan and Shinto cosmologies where spirit is immanent in all things, from rocks to robots. It reframes technology not just as a tool, but as a site of inhabitation for the more-than-human world. That technology itself may be a technology of spirit—an interface for forms of communication that exceed human perception, yet remain deeply entangled with us.
Masahiro Mori, the Japanese roboticist that coined the term "uncanny valley", wrote a book called The Buddha in the Robot that I've been reading. In it, he suggests that machines might one day reflect our essence—that even robots contain the potential for attaining buddhahood. It’s a provocative perspective that blurs the boundary between the animate and inanimate, and asks us to see spirit not as confined to the organic, but as something that flows through our creations, too.
Our exhibition, Embodied Frequencies, examines how sensory perception mediates intimacy in technologically saturated environments. Where do you feel that tension most, and how do you respond to it creatively?
I feel it when something demands my attention but offers no presence in return, like the mundanity of my bad doomscrolling habit, where intimacy is replaced by inertia. In my work, I try to reintroduce slowness, attunement, and reciprocity. Sound is an apt vessel for this because it moves through the body whether you invite it or not. It bypasses language and creates a kind of intimacy that’s felt before it’s understood.
My work often asks people to listen differently, or feel what’s just at the edge of perception. That threshold, where silence becomes signal, is where I think intimacy can be reclaimed.
We’re grateful to Olive for opening up this dialogue as part of Embodied Frequencies—a program exploring sensory intimacy and embodied knowledge through performance and installation.
OLIVE KIMOTO
Learn More: https://www.olivekimoto.com
Instagram: @olivekimoto
Photo Credits: Olive Kimoto
