Jake Oleson is a multidisciplinary artist harnessing film, electronic music, and emerging technologies to craft compelling narratives. His work meets introspection with visceral sensory catharsis.
He began his career at 18, directing documentaries, short films, and commercials for brands such as Airbnb, Facebook, P&G, and Gatorade. His work has garnered numerous awards and Vimeo Staff Picks. The throughline of his films is the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity. In his mid-twenties, Jake shifted his focus inward, creating his own electronic music. He uses sound to explore his personal experiences of grief and recovery from addiction. His music interweaves intricate, hallucinatory sound design bound together with wistful melodic phrases that serve as an emotional anchor.
In 2023, Oleson began fusing his cinematic work with his music in a series of live audio-visual shows. His project “Given Again,” performed at Siggraph and winning silver at Runway ML’s AI Film Festival, pioneers the use of machine learning scanning technology NeRFs to explore a young woman losing her grip on reality. Jake embraced NeRF scan’s unique artifacts in “Given Again” to navigate through the woman’s fracturing consciousness, accompanied by his own haunting score. He built on his understanding of this cutting edge technology to create NeRF films for artists like RL Grime and Zayn Malik.
More recently, Jake has been performing “Flux,” a live AV show co-created with artist Kevin Peter He. The duo utilizes the video game software Unreal Engine 5 and Jake’s music to observe an AI-entity's mission to comprehend the depths of the human experience. The AI endures a series of traumatic tests in an effort to feel fear, loss, the eternal search for meaning, and peace.
Jake is based in Brooklyn and is the son of two loving artists.