Ebe Oke is a London-based composer and multimedia artist working with sound and performance. Largely self-taught, Ebe’s practice has evolved through a bespoke education that includes composition lessons with Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as mentorships and collaborations with artists such as AA Bronson, Brian Eno, and Laurie Anderson. Artist residencies, including New York’s Watermill Center, where Ebe researched stagecraft with Robert Wilson, have also significantly shaped their practice.
Growing up on an exotic bird sanctuary in South Georgia, Ebe spent their childhood exploring temperate forests, studying nature, and boating through swamps. Ebe credits the richly biodiverse swamp’s chorus—shifting with the seasons, weather, and time of day—as one of their most significant influences as a composer. These early experiences laid the foundation for an approach that often examines the patterns and sounds of nature, incorporating bird song as a generative instrument and blending organic and digital processes to create immersive compositions and performances as an exercise in worldbuilding.
Ebe’s work has been showcased internationally at Tate St Ives, the Serpentine Gallery in London, The Kitchen and Pioneer Works in New York, Punkt Festival in Norway, and Art Basel in Switzerland, and most recently on the cultural program Dommune in Tokyo. Ebe's practice also intersects with pioneering platforms like Wavepaths, a startup providing generative music for psychedelic psychotherapy, merging art with emerging science in the field of neuro-aesthetic experiences.
Utilizing a broad range of mediums—painting, collage, printing, photography, performance, choreography, design, poetry, storytelling, music composition, and sound art—Ebe's work often centers on a common idea or explores interconnected themes and questions. Drawing inspiration from both the natural world and the realm of technology—spanning contemporary tools to historical devices—Ebe investigates the dynamic relationships between nature and technology, randomness and control, and abstraction and figuration, uncovering unexpected connections and creating spaces where participants can engage with perspectives beyond human experience.
Photo by David Barbanel