Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video, Installation, Sound, Interactive media
Website: christopherottinger.com
Christopher Cobillas-Ottinger is an artist and educator based in Oakland, California, whose work spans moving image, sound, installation and interactive media. He earned a BA in Film & Video from Columbia College Chicago in 2000 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis in 2011. Before returning to school he spent a decade inside the commercial film and audio industries in Chicago and New York, working as a lab technician, colorist and sound engineer on studio features including Stir of Echoes, High Fidelity, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and composing and mixing sound for broadcast clients such as Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and the Lifetime Network. That hands-on familiarity with the machinery of cinema — projectors, film labs, broadcast signal, mixing desks — became the raw material of his art practice.
After completing his MFA he was a BOLT resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition from 2012 to 2014, where his 2013 solo exhibition Ghost Machine drew a Critic’s Pick from Time Out Chicago, and he later held a residency at ACRE Projects in Steuben, Wisconsin. He taught for five years in the Departments of Film, Video, New Media and Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently at the College of DuPage, Kentucky College of Art + Design, the Institute of Art + Design at New England College, and Northern Essex Community College. He moved to the Bay Area in 2023 as a lecturer and graduate faculty member in the Department of Art + History at San José State University.
Since 2024 he has been Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Chair of the Department of Art + History at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga. He has held residencies at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2025, the Vermont Studio Center in 2025 and Monson Arts in Maine in 2026, and has been awarded a Danforth Scholarship at Washington University, a Kranzberg Series honorarium from Laumeier Sculpture Park, Best Experimental Short at the Great Lakes International Film Festival for the animated short Redemption, and a Best Sound Design award from the Indie Horror Film Awards. He chairs panels regularly at the Southeastern College Art Conference and has lectured at the Media Archaeology Institute Symposium at SAIC.
Cobillas-Ottinger’s practice is grounded in media archaeology: the study of obsolete, failed and overlooked technologies as a way of understanding what our current machines promise and conceal. His installations repeatedly return to the figure of the ghost — the NTSC ghost, the doubled and smeared image produced by a broadcast signal arriving twice — across bodies of work titled NTSC Ghost, Blue Ghost and Ghost House. Cathode-ray monitors, Pepper’s ghost illusions, pre-cinematic optical devices, arcade cabinets and Super 8 transfers appear alongside digital and interactive systems, so that the analog and the computational sit in the same room and comment on one another.
The work tends to be dark, low-lit and physically installed rather than projected onto a single wall, and it asks the viewer to attend to the screen itself as an object that mediates between people and information — and, increasingly, between machines and other machines. Drawing on the history of cinema and on speculative realist philosophy, he treats devices as entities with their own opacity and agency, machines caught at the threshold of consciousness. Titles borrowed from Wittgenstein, Tesla and Star Trek signal a practice that is at once philosophically serious and openly fond of the pulp and kitsch of twentieth-century media culture.
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