Owen Hindley

Hi there! I'm a digital artist creating work for stage, screens and spaces using code, electronics and sound.

I've created VR theatre, interactive music experiences, an enormous game of PONG, a pinata-smashing robot, music videos, and video games.

Here's the story so far :

Works & Performances

Tíð / Winter Lights Festival Reykjavík 2024

Audiovisual projection installation with Þorsteinn Eyfjörð
  1. February 2024
tíð-owen-hindley-þorsteinn-eyfjörð-vetrahátið-2024

A tryptych of giant faces loom over you on a cold winter's night, accompanied by a pulsing soundtrack. Maybe you recognise some of them as they fade through the noise.

'Tið' is a playful installation by Þorsteinn Eyfjörð and myself for Reykjavík's annual Winter Lights Festival (Vetrarhátíð) inspired by the poem 'Barn' by Steinn Steinarr. The giant floating heads are created from LIDAR scans of members of the public,constantly cycling through their self-reported stages of life.

Audio-reactive, and interactive, we invited members of the public to come and have their faces 'scanned' inside the warmth of Hafnarhaus and look at the work whilst enjoying a waffle or two.

Created as part of Hafnar.haus Hringekja, also produced by Þorsteinn and myself, consisting of an exhibition of this and two other projected works by Atli Bollason and Heimir Freyr Hlöðversson, plus over 20 video pieces by members of the creative Hafnarhaus community.

tíð-owen-hindley-þorsteinn-eyfjörð-vetrahátið-2024 tíð-owen-hindley-þorsteinn-eyfjörð-vetrahátið-2024
  • Hafnarhaus: >
  • Þorsteinn Eyfjörð Þórarinsson: >
  • Atli Bollason: >
  • Heimir Freyr Hlöðversson: >

Fallax

VR Film
  1. 2021-current
vrShort-portfolio

A fantastical journey into the Icelandic highlands and beyond with two escaped convicts and their driver.

Performed by circus artists during lockdown, recorded using full-body motion capture.

Work in progress! Upon release, the piece will be available for Oculus Quest and other major VR platforms.

  • Hikapee Circus Theatre :
  • Target3D :

This Machine Throws Pixels

Ongoing performance practice
  1. 2007-current

Since I was a student I've gone through stages of performing as a visualist alongside musicians for concerts, raves and club events.

Starting when Pendulum came to our university in 2007, and I (unprompted) threw together a bunch of pre-rendered footage into Resolume and jammed it out, I've loved the experience of playing with images live, responding to the music as it comes.

Since then it's been a nice offshoot of my regular practice, which often involves making some kind of real-time system for visuals anyway.

VJ-ing

In the beginning of 2023 it's received a bit of a boost with a bunch of underground, DIY-ish shows in Reykjavík, and I've developed a TouchDesigner-based system to be able to show up and perform pretty much anywhere, including live control over any lights in the venue, multiple projectors, that kind of thing.

Often things I learn from doing this makes its way back into my 'professional' work, little visual tricks, or some weird combination of effects that you end up coming up with in the moment.

The Moon Seat

Audio-visual public installation
  1. 2016-17
Moon Seat
  • The Tab:
  • The Moon Seat at e-Luminate 2016 :
  • Project Website :

The Moon Seat is a playful installation that entertains our inner child whilst simultaneously courting long forgotten childhood fears. The installation had its first public outing at the e-Luminate festival in Cambridge, UK from 12th-17th February 2016, and was located on the front lawn of the prestigious Cambridge Union Society.

Audience members were invited to sit, at which point the pool of moonlight would instantly open to show their shadow. After a few seconds, their shadow would transform into an animal controlled by their bodily movements, but with a character all of its own. An ethereal generative soundtrack reacting to the user's movements accompanies the piece.

I'd worked with Alex for a long time at B-Reel, and I was very excited to be asked to get involved in his first independent installation art piece! It quickly became apparent that we were going to need some more help, so we drafted in ex-B-Reelers and good friends Yi-Wen Lin and Christian Persson to come on board.

We pulled in quite a variety of technologies for this one, including Processing (main show), NodeWebkit (gesture detection & tracking), Flash/AIR (character animation & playback) and Pure Data (generative audio & DMX control)

Mmorph

Browser-based interactive audio experience
  1. 2016
mmorph by MassiveMusic
  • Site link :
  • Case Study Video :
  • FWA PCA of The Year (Nomination):
  • FWA Site of The Month:
  • Awwwards Honorable Mention:
  • FWA Insights:

mmorph is an adventure into new ways of delivering interactive music in the browser and beyond.

A collaboration between global music agency MassiveMusic, Reactify Music, Grotesk, Enzien Audio and myself, mmorph is an example of a new workflow which we hope will open up many possibilities for interactive audio – first in the browser, and then for games, apps, installations and VR.

The site takes you through an interactive music piece, enabling different musical parts, applying realtime effects, composing and looping a top-line synth, and creating intense build-ups and drops!

My role was lead developer on the project, handling the integration of the audio code from Reactify & Enzien Audio (who in turn were working with original music composed by Massive) with realtime SVG graphics and animations art-directed by Grotesk.

The interactive audio was produced via a unique workflow where Reactify worked rapidly and closely with Massive’s in-house composer in Pure Data, an visual programming environment that allows for real-time prototyping and development.

This Pure Data ‘patch’ was then converted to run in the browser via Enzien Audio’s Heavy compiler. This compiler can also transform the same source patch into code suitable for Unity, Unreal engine, OpenFrameworks, desktop/mobile apps and VR experiences, with little or no alterations to the original.

  • MassiveMusic:
  • Reactify:
  • Enzien Audio:
  • Grotesk Studio:

Harpa Pong

Massive outdoor game
  1. 2014
  • Vice Magazine :
  • Reykjavik Grapevine :
  • Iceland Magazine:
  • Homepage :
  • Menningarnótt site (Icelandic) :
  • Github :

PONG is a massive interactive outdoor artwork that allows two people to play the classic game against each other on the monumental facade of Harpa, Iceland’s flagship concert hall in downtown Reykjavik, designed by Ólafur Eliasson.

Conceived and produced by Atli Bollason, the project began as a chance meeting between myself and Atli at a birthday party in Reykjavik, and over the next few months developed into a reality – with not only the CEO of the building coming on board very quickly, but for the first time for a project like this, Ólafur himself (the first time he has allowed a project like this to take over the facade’s lighting system). Vodafone Iceland also agreed to sponsor the project, and supply us with some of the equipment.

The project was launched on Menningarnótt (Culture Night) on the 23rd August 2014, and ran for a week afterwards as part of the Reykjavik Dance Festival. For the launch night, we setup a stage in front of the building, and players used a pair of phones to control their ‘paddles’ on the 43m-high screen. Afterwards, players were able to join a special Wi-fi network which took them directly to the game, which was transmitted from a hill overlooking the building. This would allow them to join a virtual queue, and play against friends or complete strangers.

Our roles were split with Atli handling the concept, creative direction, project management and publicity, and me handling the design, hardware, networking and programming.

Three separate Node.js servers run together to create the experience; one running in the basement of Harpa which outputs DMX to control the 35×11 pixel display (6 universes of 512 channels each), one running in the cloud which actually simulates the game physics, and receives WebSocket connections from the player’s phone, and another which handles the game queue.

An HTML5 mobile front-end was also developed to give visual feedback to the player of their paddle, and current score. The code for the entire project is available on github.

Collaborations & Commercial

More commercial projects where I've been brought in as a contractor or collaborator, often on the technical side of things.

Imogen Heap - Last Night Of An Empire

Mixed Reality Music Video
  1. 2021
  2. VFX, Developer
  3. Unity, Houdini
lnoae-portfolio

During my time with Volta, we were thrilled to collaborate with world-renowned musician and innovator Imogen Heap to create the official video for her single Last Night Of An Empire.

Volta had at that point been developing its AR capabilities, particularly by integrating Keijiro Takahashi's Rcam2 library, which allowed us to easily integrate a real camera feed from a LIDAR-equipped iPad with 3D objects and visuals generated in Unity, and be able to freely move the camera around the space.

True to her experimental and open spirit, Imogen decided that the recording of the video would also be live-streamed, meaning everything from the camera movment to AR visual effects and Imogen's choreography were repeated and refined over and over again and streamed to Youtube, whilst we searched for the perfect take.

Imogen's loyal legion of Heapsters provided encouragement and comment via the stream, and after just over three hours, the final take was in the bag. But it didn't end there - we also produced a standalone VR-only version of the video to be included as an archived performance inside of Volta.

Ahead of the recording at Imogen's barn studio space in Essex, I got to work creating visual elements in Houdini + Unity, and exposing parameters for on-set creative technologist Alexis Michallek to hook up to the Ableton session running the show so he could choreograph the AR visuals in time with the playback.

For the VR version, along with several new visual effects, I built several extensions to the Unity Timeline system to allow me to work quickly with the existing Volta setup and create a tightly synced experience (separate to the livestreamed video).

The VR video is unfortunately only available inside Volta VR, but you can catch a 2D recording of it here

  • Volta :
  • Official Video :
  • Mini-documentary :
  • Livestreamed making-of recording :

HTC Vive Launch Site

Global launch site for HTC Vive
  1. 2016
  2. Lead Development
  3. JS, GLSL, WebGL
> viveready.htcvr.com
  • FWA PCA of The Year (Nomination):
  • FWA Site of The Month:
  • Awwards SOTD :

>Get Vive Ready by HTC, Google and B-Reel was a WebGL experience that invites the user to test if they are ‘Vive Ready’, to promote the launch of HTC’s Vive VR headset.

The site uses a mobile device as a controller for the 3D desktop experience, and requires you to chop, dodge, swing and shake your way through four challenging levels.

Users completing all four levels were able to enter a prize draw to win an actual Vive headset and controller set.

The site involves some cutting-edge WebGL and mobile phone interaction, which we were happy to see recognised in a number of awards including the FWA’s site of the Month (which followed our project Mmorph’s award the previous month!)

Sónar Reykjavík Visuals

Building-scale generative visuals
  1. 2014-16
  2. Design, Coordination, Development
  3. NodeJS, DMX
> Watch 2016 Video
> Watch 2015 Video
  • HarpaPONG:
  • Sónar Reykjavik:
  • Harpa:
  • Press:
  • Festival Insights:
  • VjSpain: (Spanish)
  • Yi-Wen Lin (visuals collaborator) process blog post :

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.

The Light Organ

Audio-visual public installation
  1. 2016
  2. Development
  3. NodeJS, Max/MSP, DMX
  • Vice Magazine / The Creators Project :

HARMONY IS COLOUR.
PITCH IS POSITION.
STRENGTH IS BRILLIANCE.

For a few days in February 2016, visitors of Harpa Music Hall in Reykjavík were invited to play the façade of the building as they would an instrument. A “light organ” was placed on the 4th floor balcony, with a stunning view of the inside of the geometrical glass front and the downtown area.

Anyone who passed through could learn how to play in blue or red or green, with quick flashes or swelling pads of light, and impress the whole city with an optical performance.

Conceived & produced by Atli Bollason.
Developed by:
Yuli Levtov, Reactify
Ragnar Ingi Hrafnkelsson, Reactify
Owen Hindley
Build supervisor:
Jonas Johansson

The Piñata Smashing Robot

Physical/digital advertising stunt
  1. 2015
  2. Electronics, Design, Build
  3. Node.js

International agency Isobar collaborated with B-Reel and Groovy Gecko to create a live, web-connected experience that allowed users to smash a real-life piñata using a robotic arm, in order to promote the new flavours of Pringles Tortillas.

Users in the UK and Germany were able to sign up via Twitter and/or Facebook to take a hit at the unlucky piñata, successful entrants would win a Tortillas-related prize!

B-Reel approached me to lead the design and build of the robotic arm – a really fun challenge!

This required a lot of research into fabrication methods, and learning about pneumatics for the first time, combined with electronic control (via Phidgets) and backend development to connect the entire system to the website (being developed by Isobar)

After constructing two beautiful robots (Pedro & Mario, in reserve), we to work smashing piñatas, the arm pounding each one with 20psi of force per hit. Over 40 piñatas a day were obliterated live online, in a custom-built Mexican marketplace set deep within East London.

  • Isobar casestudy:
  • B-Reel casestudy:

XBox Glitch ARG

Online ARG / Cryptic competition
  1. 2014
  2. Concepting, development and sound design
  3. HTML5, PHP, Server administration
  • Huffington Post :
  • Campaign Live :

‘The Glitch’ was a highly secretive and unusual campaign launched by Microsoft, CP+B and B-Reel that took players on a journey across the Internet, challenging them to solve puzzles and crack codes to win a mysterious prize.

This formed part of the UK XBox One launch, and part of Microsoft’s effort to engage directly with hardcore gamers by working on their level. The glitch took the form of a 1 second ‘disruption’ to the Xbox TV collaboration that had already been on regular rotation on UK TV channels for some time. Hidden within this were a number of codes and clues that would set players off on their journey.

I headed up the development side of the project team at B-Reel, and was responsible for laying out this network of cryptic sites across the web in such a way as to give no clue as to who, or what was behind the Glitch.

A sophisticated PHP backend system was built to monitor and control all the various endpoints to allow tracking of players as they moved through the contest, and shutting off routes as soon as prizes had been awarded.

In addition, I was also responsible for the glitched-up sound design across all of the routes, which added to the air of mystery and suspense surrounding the campaign.

  • B-Reel :
  • CP+B London :

City Of Drones

Audio-visual experience for web + installation
  1. 2014
  2. Audio and Physics developer
  3. WebGL, WebAudio, DART

City of Drones is an interactive digital environment developed by musician John Cale, speculative architect Liam Young and digital artists FIELD. Charting the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract cityscape, players are invited to pilot a virtual craft and remotely explore this imaginary world.

Samples from Cale’s original soundscape compositions echo across the landscape as we see the city through the eyes of the drone, buzzing between the buildings, drifting endlessly, in an ambient audio visual choreography.

City of Drones lives online, and as an installation at the Barbican Center, London, as part of the Digital Revolution exhibition.

I was brought on to the project to develop the dynamic audio of the piece with the team at FIELD. This involved remixing original material from John Cale, including bespoke work from BXFTYS, and setting it all in a constantly changing, immersive 3D sonic landscape.

Spot sound effects are triggered by different locations within the environment, and the sounds of drones as they fly past are processed using the WebAudio HRTF panner to accurately position the sounds in 3D space.

The background music layer and ambience also change as you fly through the different areas. In addition, I also contributed to the physics of the drones, giving them some freedom of movement as they fly around the space, avoiding buildings and each other, plus I developed the on-screen HUD graphics and animation.

  • Field.io :
  • Liam Young :
  • John Cale:
  • BXFTYS:
Project Archive

Older projects that define my early career and interests.

Talks & Education

When I've been asked to lecture or run workshops for students or institutions about my work or projects.

About & Bio

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 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.

Awards
Nominations
Links
Recent Employment history
  • 2014-current Freelance Creative Technologist & Digital Artist
  • 2020-2021 Senior Developer, Volta XR
  • 2011-2014 Senior Developer, B-Reel London