photo of Elizabeth Owens standing with one arm on her 5ft lever harp with a purple floral satin shirt on.
(eli)zabeth Owens

harpist, transmedia artist,

Multi-instrumentalist

producer & educator

What I Choose To Believe

I like to describe my work as transmedia alchemy. Through the care-ful processes of combination, distillation, and reverberation, the raw materials of experience (improvised song, spontaneous video, poetic fragments, one-take performance, digital errors, psychological โ€œglitchesโ€) are transmuted into something beautiful and cohesive. An elixir that heals the soul.

My creation process is slow, intuitive, and experimental. It usually starts with a sound, or a theme that I build on through focused inquiry and experimentation (e.g., a sudden fascination with cave symbolism, or a reverberant melody I hear in my dreams). By setting aside time to listen and follow these dream-objects when they call, I am opened to a wider net of experience. By adding to, rearranging and re-experiencing these objects in new contexts, I become a player in the dreamscape and come to a deeper level of spiritual understanding through my engagement. Both I, and the object(s), are transformed.

I find this work deeply therapeutic and have always thought of it as such. The themes I am called to explore are personal, and include addiction, queer identity, disability, and mental illness. My practice, more than anything, helps me heal my own wounds. While I can only speak for myself, I believe we are all interconnected in our pain and joy and that this work will speak to all levels of human experience for those who take the time to listen closely.

Elizabeth Owens performing at the Pocket, DC

UPCOMING SHOWS

knock knock

Knock Knock is a 15-track visual album that explores themes of recovery, spiritual reflection, self-compassion and the heroโ€™s journey.

MUSIC + VIDEO

alchemical experiments in music, video, sound, animation, collage, and emerging technologies such as AI iteration an augmented reality

โ€œLaypersonโ€ was created by feeding images of smoke through AI style transfer programs Night Studio Cafe and eBsynth onto video footage of (Eli)zabeth singing. Additional editing was done to enhance visual pacing and bring out the haunting beauty of the AI renderings.

โ€œReceiverโ€ combines AR (augmented reality) filters with opacity layering to explore themes of technological and psychological oversaturation. Shot in a single take.

Created in the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, โ€œOnce in a Whileโ€ was improvised in one take using PhotoBooth and remixed/edited over the course of two hours using scanned collage assets and creative commons stock video textures.

โ€œHospitalityโ€ is an audio-visual collage that combines improvised choreography, scanned magazine cuttings from home & garden magazines, color mattes, video textures, and field recordings of water to evoke and encourage experiences of inward reflection, emotional synthesis, and self-compassion.

Inspired by 8-bit indie games like Celeste and Stardew Valley, โ€œCliffsideโ€ is all about climbing, striving, persevering, but never quite reaching the next level. All visual elements were created in Adobe Photoshop and edited using Premiere.

โ€œPatienceโ€ is a game. Created in Unity by (Eli)zabeth Owens, โ€œPatienceโ€ allows players to fly through a darkened world with no objective or destination. The music video combines POV capture of gameplay with POV footage of Owens performing the song on piano, serving serious piano-spaceship vibes. Play the game here: https://eliowens19.itch.io/patience

โ€œOnly Humanโ€ was generated using the spectrogram tool in Chrome Music Lab, a tool I often use as a music educator to help kids understand sound as a material object. Audio of the song was fed into the spectrogram and a video capture was taken. From there, the visuals were processed using VR/360 editing tools and overlayed with a profile silhouette of (Eli)zabeth using a track matte.

This piece was generated using AI-based style transfer via the software eBsynth. Using a single frame drawn by Eli, we mapped this image onto video footage of them performing the song and let it destroy itself over the course of the performance, embracing the โ€œbugsโ€ and โ€œglitchesโ€ of the output.

โ€œBewareโ€ is a simple meditation on movement and digital reflection. Choreographed and shot in one take (i.e., improvised) and edited entirely in Adobe Premiere.

Inspired and necessitated by lockdown, โ€œOversoonโ€ goes meta with Zoom. Using Zoomโ€™s virtual background feature, we created a video background of the performance space and recorded, in Zoom, a choreographed performance of the song with the virtual background. Once I start moving through the space, the real background/space starts to peek in through the virtual mask, begging the viewer to question what is real and what is virtual.

โ€œPotionโ€ explores the tender and vulnerable iterations of addiction recovery. Just as recovery takes repeated processing and deep listening, the one-take performance footage for โ€œPotionโ€ was repeatedly layered and run through VDMX (video projection and remixing software). While the softwareโ€™s effects couldnโ€™t be predicted, they could be experienced, reflected upon, and gently massaged into a beautiful whole.

โ€œDay Oneโ€ is a culmination of lessons learned from every technology and medium used in Knock Knock. It combines 8-bit animation, tracking mattes, AI style transfer, and one-take performance with a paradoxically raw and stripped-down musical performance.

LIVE PERFORMANCE