Åste Amundsen
Theatre maker, experience designer and researcher. Exploring better transport of audiences into immersive storyworlds, through data-augmented interaction and responsive storytelling.
Image credit: Creative Informatics Edinburgh
My scenography education, and counterculture background have combined in a practice spanning playable stories, worldbuilding and digital-dramaturgy. I have worked for twenty years across creative, design and production roles, delivering tech-enabled staging, interaction and storytelling, within my own artistic projects, and for clients and partners across independent festivals, theatre and tech-art installations, - as well as immersive events for super-rich private individuals, and international media and fashion brands.
Projects include: Computer Aided Theatre, where we make narrative and interaction tools for live performance; a season of tech art, games and maker-culture onboard art-ship MS Stubnitz at Canary Wharf; interactive black-comedy The Apocalypse Gameshow; wearable-tech performance project Sonic Sideshow; and pioneering immersive festival-venue the Underground Piano Bar, at Glastonbury.
As a SWCTN Immersion Fellow I explored profiling for personalisation within immersive theatre. I am now pursuing that research further, through a practice PhD with StoryFutures at RHUL.
Currently I am thinking about how we construct our experience of reality, during times of radical-discontinuity; speculative futures simulations; hybrid AI-human interaction systems; embodiment distortions in VR and Homuncular Flexibility. I am also wondering what an immersive 'poor theatre' might look like.
Since the pandemic i have been working on 'FridaCapri' in my spare time. Converting an old Ford Capri to electric, in an attempt to future-proof my long distance travel.
I once co-scripted an artist-statment-generator, in the hope of never writing another biog.