Originally from Reno, Nevada, Pete Froslie currently practices in Oklahoma, where his work explores intersections of art, technology and culture. Froslie is the Director of the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma and a Professor of Art, Technology and Culture. He received his MFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at MassArt and his BFA from the University of Nevada-Reno.
Froslie has long been fascinated with the relationship between global political and economic structures and emerging issues of climate and environmental change. Recently, Froslie spent more than a month aboard the barquentine Antigua, a three-masted ship, during expeditions to the Arctic Circle, around the Svalbard archipelago in June 2019 and October 2017. These trips took Froslie into territory seldom seen by humans, as well as abandoned Soviet mines, and the Global Seed Vault. On these two expeditions, Froslie collected a variety of digital assets, including underwater recordings of melting ice in Svalbard fjords and video footage of wildlife and human impact in the area.
These expeditions are part of Froslie’s multi-year project, Leviathan: The Aesthetics of Capital, which began in 2016 with an ART365 grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. With the ART365 project, Froslie used chemical processes to extract rare earth metals from electronic waste to help answer the question “How best can we see capital?”. In Leviathan, Froslie continues his exploration of how capital can be seen and understood by integrating understandings of climate change, moral and political philosophy, philosophical aesthetics and demonology through the media of experimental electro-mechanics and game engine-based digital projection.
Email: froslie@ou.edu
