Glow: Illuminating innovation

Premiered at King's Strand Campus · 7 March - 20 April 2024

A multi-sited London exhibition, showcases groundbreaking artworks by leading women artists working with cutting-edge technologies.
From early AI explorations in the 1980s to Virtual Reality (VR) in the 1990s, to virtual world creation in the 2000s, and portable VR in the 2010s, GLoW: Illuminating Innovation chronicles the often overlooked impact of women on the evolution of technology.

I was a supporting technologist for this project, working with the four artists who were commmissioned to create new work.

My work (with colleague Neil Jakeman at KDL) focused on giving advice on immersive XR technologies, from real time engines like Unreal and Unity to WebXR frameworks and bits of middleware scripting. That was the easy bit. The harder part, and why I was chosen to be one of the technologists, was evaluating these technologies from a creative perspective in conversation with their work as it evolved, trying to find the right mix of tools that would be effective, sustainable, and live up to their creative vision.

It was a lot of fun.

For more on how this collaboration worked, I co-wrote an article with Neil Jake,am for KDL's blog that goes into more detail about how the collaboration worked.

The largest amount of development work I did was for the artist Yarli Allison on her work, Stem Cell City. I built a virtual stem cell clinic for her in WebXR, using A-Frame and Three.js.