The Art of Chaos and Collaboration

Tei Blow’s initial exposure to artistic collaboration was accidental. In his first semester at Oberlin, Blow ’02 enrolled in an interdisciplinary class called New Media Collaborations, co-taught by professors in the TIMARA, dance, and studio art departments. The multimedia course was offered just as brand-new editing technology like Final Cut was rolling out, giving students the opportunity to discover new tools and explore different ways of working together. 

For a college first-year student who had never done anything creative, the emphasis on collaboration and play was a radical way of thinking and making, Blow says. “I skipped a very necessary step as an artist of learning formal rudiments. My first lesson was learning to work with other people.”

As Blow continued at Oberlin, he built on what he learned in New Media Collaborations through courses in other departments. Emeritus Professor of English Anu Needham’s course, Anglophone Postcolonial Literature of the Third World, transformed how Blow approached texts and incorporated them into his work. He was also one of Professor of Studio Art and Photography Pipo Nguyen-Duy’s first photography students. 

Blow spent his winter terms putting these lessons into practice by creating music with his friends. “It was a strange, roundabout way of learning how to work collaboratively through individualized practices,” he says. “The spirit of that Oberlin cohort was, ‘Let’s go out and try to build something together, because that’s how we will find our artistic voices and our interests.’”

The lessons he learned at Oberlin enabled Blow to create a body of work oriented around site-specific installation art, built on a foundation of manipulating sounds, music, video, and photography. 

And this ethos of working with others to create art and learn more about the self has remained integral to Blow’s life and artistic practice. He now co-leads Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE), a collaborative company (and a self-defined “musical priesthood” that aims to use ancient practices to solve modern problems) that dates back to Blow’s time at Oberlin. 

Over the years working in New York, Blow has crossed paths with many artistic Obies who embody that same spirit of collaboration and curiosity. While working on a show with costume designer Montana Levi Blanco ’07 in 2019, Blow and Blanco found themselves “speaking the same artistic language,” Blow recalls. “We wondered, ‘Why is it that we speak the same language? Oh, it’s because of Oberlin.’”

These days, Blow is pivoting his practice into experimental and interactive art for children. This year he’s directing a play by the Japanese writer Toshiki Okada—Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise—and making a family-friendly interactive installation, Stompopolis, that opens at the Perelman Arts Center in May 2026.

“I want to create art that has no function other than to create pandemonium and chaos and joy,” says Blow. “All of these things I thought about in school, and the peripheral teachings of the school beyond the classroom, have become my artistic practice now. I’m excited to see where it leads.”