✋ Hi, I'm Owen!
I create work for stage, screens and spaces using software, electronics and sound.
I've made VR theatre shows, music videos, enormous games of PONG, a robot that smashes pinatas, a circus show, a short video game and an ARG for Xbox, amongst other things.
Here's the story so far...
Work in progress! Release is scheduled for early 2023, for Oculus Quest and other major VR platforms.
One day, you wake up and find yourself trapped in a transparent box in a hostile, barren landscape - but it appears you're not alone.
There is the Caretaker, who says they just want to keep you safe inside this box, promising to show you wonders beyond imagining.
There are the Others, individuals trapped in boxes just as you are - some of whom are acting strangely.
And the Voice in your head - together all of them are talking, acting, behaving at odds with one another - so who will you believe?
Based on my theatre company Huldufugl's international award-winning VR experience 'Kassinn / A Box In The Desert' (one of the world's first experiences of its kind), this show expands the narrative to allow five audience members to determine their own story against a barrage of conflicting voices.
My role on this project was lead developer, director and live show operator, with the concept and script co-created by the whole amazing team.
The show takes place entirely in VR using the Oculus Quest headset.
Performances:
Created for the Isle of Games 002 (see isleofgames.is) exhibition on the theme of “The Tempest”, the player is making their way through a pitch black world, with nothing but the wind to guide their path.
The installation version was for two people to cooperate, one using a joystick to control the character, the other using rotating lava rock + button to control the wind. This version is just controlled using the keyboard.
Game can be downloaded from itch.io : ⤤
One of the world's first pieces of its kind, the show explores what happens by smashing together future-thinking theatre forms with technology.
Created by Huldufugl (an Icelandic / British events company co-founded by myself and writer, actress & producer Nanna Gunnars), the piece is a mix of Virtual Reality, mutliplayer gaming and interactive theatre.
The concept initially began as a short play by Nanna, written and performed in a conventional theatre in 2016 – after which I put forward the idea to re-create this piece in VR. We premiered the first version in Reykjavík in August 2017, and developed it for a longer run in July 2018, before taking the show to the Stockholm Fringe Festival in September 2018, and with more international dates planned for 2019!
One person at a time experiences the piece inside of a 2 x 2m physical space, whilst the actor performs in a separate physical space. For our first outing, we used the Xsens motion capture suit (expertly handled by PuppIT), but currently the show involves two Oculus Rift setups, sharing the same virtual space using multiplayer networking.
Show control is handled by an operator, who can observe and control both events in the world and the ‘voice in your head’ via a Qlab interface, and we have a beautiful LED box created by Swedish engineering magicians Svartljus
After touring the piece throughout Europe and to the USA, we went back into the rehearsal room to re-create the experience for more than one audience member at a time. The result is Hliðstætt Fólk / Parallel People, which you can read more about above.
After a chance introduction in Iceland via the wonderful people at Bedroom Community, I was invited to submit a proposal for a launch title for Google’s new VR headset, Daydream.
I contacted my long-term collaborator Yuli Levtov and together with our friends David Li and Leif Podhajsky, we laid out plans to create the first music-focused title for this new platform.
After launch, in collaboration with Ninja Tune heavyweight artist Bonobo, the Horizons team (Yuli Levtov, David Li, Leif Podhajsky and myself) saddled up again to create a brand new psychedelic interactive music journey for the Horizons platform on Google Daydream.
The new scene features the track Outlier from his latest album Migration, and allows you to deeply interact with the music, which in turn has an effect on the landscape you fly through. Flocks of birds join you on your journey through sand dunes, towering mountains and beneath the waves.
After the sad demise of the Google Daydream platform, we were approached by HTC to port the title to their range of devices, and it is now available on HTC Viveport for HTC Vive, Focus and Flow.
In 2017, my studio Horizons (with co-founders Yuli Levtov and David Li) was approached by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's VR powerhouse Within to help them develop an incredibly ambitious VR project in collaboration with Oculus Studios, and the musical / creative force of OKGO.
The task was to create an experience in VR where the user could produce their very own pop song, complete with drums, bass, guitar, synth, vocals (recorded and auto-tuned by the user) and a special cow-based freestyle solo instrument.
The final piece includes a staggering amount of layers of animation, machine learning, audio analysis and processing, a custom sound engine, VR interaction and musical theory.
In 2018 we were very excited to give the world a peek of the final piece, at both Tribeca Film Festival and Sonar+ in Barcelona.
Two audience members at a time, carefully guided by white-coated docents, could collaborate on building a song together in a purpose-built booth. The piece attracted a significant amount of positive attention, being described as 'Social VR's Rock Band' by Wired, and others.
My role as lead developer ranged from prototyping musical interaction concepts at the start of the project, to co-ordinating the fantastic development team across several different cities and time zones, overseeing the asset pipeline of animated creatures from the art team into Unity, and working directly on various parts of the project.
We're excited for the final public release of the project, to see the music people make in the Menagerie of the Holy Cow!
So I’ve been a massive fan of Universal Everything’s work ever since Matt Pyke formed the studio post-Designers Republic, so being invited to join them as a developer on this adventure was a bit exciting, to say the least!
The brief was to produce a real-time, interactive artwork that would be projected onto seven monumental ‘petals’, designed and inhabiting a space by Zaha Hadid Architects, within a relatively short timeframe – and with a lot of press attention on the final result, so no small order.
With a tight timeline, the lead developer Chris Mullany and I developed a system for simulating choreographed bird-like motion onto thousands of unique ‘avatars’ – playful, generative striped characters who would fly and dance around the space.
We worked rapidly in Unity, with Chris handling the creation and rendering of the Avatars, and me handling the flocking motion and choreographies that would play in synchronicity with composed music from Simon Pyke / Freefarm.
The final setup in Milan required an impressive assortment of hardware, handled by an amazing crew of projectionists, d3 operators, sound and lighting designers, and our playback rig – 6 high-end PCs running Unity apps, all synchronised via network from a single server, from which we could adjust and refine all aspects of the show once we arrived in Milan.
Sónar is an international festival of progressive music and multimedia arts, originally out of Barcelona, but now taking place in several locations worldwide, including Reykjavik since 2013. It is hosted in the landmark building Harpa, a beautiful structure with a unique interlocking cell-like front facade (designed by Olafur Eliasson) each containing an LED light fixture. Combined it forms a large outdoor screen that is visible across much of downtown Reykjavik.
Artist Atli Bollasson and I were lucky enough to be the first outside artists to do something on this facade in 2014, with the publicly-playable arcade game Harpa PONG at Reykjavík’s Culture night. After the success of PONG, Harpa and the Sónar organisers invited Atli and myself to do a repeat installation on the lights of Harpa for the festival in 2015, and again in 2016.
We knew we wanted to do a bit more than simply re-run PONG, so instead we decided – in addition to running the game – we would turn the entire building into an audio-reactive light show, taking the music being played inside and use it to drive the visuals outside.
To do this we reached out to other creative developers, providing them with a code framework, brief, and challenge to do something amazing with only 36 x 11 pixels. We ended up with over 12 functioning visual responses from 8 developers from around Europe, which was way beyond our expectations.
Owen (he/him) is a collaborative digital artist, working with software, sound, and electronics for the web, VR, performances, devices and installations.
His commercial work has included serving as technical lead on large, cutting-edge projects for clients such as Oculus Studios, Google, Microsoft/Xbox, Samsung and Mercedes, collaborating with digital creatives such as Universal Everything, FIELD and B-Reel. These projects have ranged from an interactive web-connected musical installation at the London Science Museum for Google, Web Lab, to a pneumatic live-streamed pinata-smashing robot.
He is co-founder of Huldufugl a Reykjavik-based theatre and events company experimenting with new mediums in theatre, both technological (as with their VR shows Kassinn and Hliðstætt Fólk), and immersive
He is also co-founder of Horizons Studio, a London-based creative studio producing interactive musical experiences in VR. Their debut title, Horizons VR was commissioned by Google as a launch title for their Daydream platform, with releases on Oculus and HTC platforms planned for 2019.
He was also Sound Supervisor and on-set sound recordist on two short independent films, The Fallow Field and Who We Are, and sound editor on the Subsource Dubumentary.