David Brendan O'Meara is a writer, director, performer, and web developer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His current work-in-progress is My Way to Canossa. In My Way to Canossa, an American history buff joins the original participants in the Walk to Canossa, driving his feudal passengers across the Alps in a rented minivan. Interwoven with the blog of this journey are investigations into three profoundly unreliable historical works about that distant event:
- The Song of Henry, a Modern English Translation of the Heinrichlied, Germany's Forgotten National Epic
- Warrior, Daughter, Saint: the Story of St. Matilda of Canossa
- The Meek Shall Inherit, a telenovela on basic cable which celebrated the life of Bertha of Savoy over 112 episodes
Dave's production company, O Tempora! O Mores! Productions has been developing, producing, and occasionally marketing innovative spoken word performances, both in live performance in various recorded media, since 1992. Spoken word projects archived on otomproductions.com include works by Dave O'Meara, Dan Hanrahan, and Art Kumbalek.
OT!OM! Labs, a semi-autonomous subsidiary, conducts research in the burgeoning field of open-source art. In March, 2008, the Labs released Kunst Mundo Discours 2008, a response to 2008 Whitney Biennial and its catalog (both the print and web versions). Equal parts hacking exercise and meta-critical commentary, Kunst Mundo Discours 2008 is also, perhaps, a reflection on the simultaneous dynamism and instability of written language in the digital age.
The Labs have also developed two mini-sites presenting the work of G DuMonthier: State Birds and Flowers: An American Landscape, and Jack & Jackie Orbit the Moon. Other projects from OT!OM! Labs include Critical Templates, a resource for developers of Artificial Criticism, Bite Size, an online engine for the creation of aleatory poetry, and Come In We're Sorry, a summer project by student interns of the Digital Defrabrication Unit, a joint venture of OT!OM! Labs and GEE Enterprises. Venture capitalists interested in participating in the growth of OT!OM! Labs should click here.
This website features several podcasts, including Five by Five, an experimental multithreaded audio daybook created by Dave O'Meara, and the OT!OM Podcast, in which past OT!OM! recordings are presented in rotating repertory.
OT!OM! Productions has also published A Metaphysician in the Dark: Three Plays for One Actor available in print from www.Lulu.com.
From 1999 to 2002, he was Artistic Director of Hotel Milwaukee, a weekly one-hour comedy-variety radio show on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio. Under Dave's direction, the show won a Golden Reel Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and was selected to be aired nationally on the A&E Channel of Sirius Satellite Radio.
In addition to writing and performing the trio of "plays for one actor" which compose A Metaphysician in the Dark, (published by OT!OM! and Lulu Press) Dave has also toured the Midwest (mainly bars and Irish festivals) with Moon & Cloud, a pair of "plays for one actor" which he adapted and performed from short stories by James Joyce and Joseph Gahagan.
Dave currently works as Webmaster at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, where he is an ardent proponent of the open-source movement.