Jack Condon
Jack Condon completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design, and is currently enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts.
Inspired by the bizarre and wonderful combination of science fiction, ideas of utopia, conflict in man, and the hope of one day going into space, Jack Condon is perfectly placed to head up a career as a practicing artist and game developer. It’s this unexpected melding of interests and talents that has brought him success in both arenas.
As a fine arts graduate from UNSW Art & Design, Jack conducts creative experiments with photography and technology. He discovered what has become a signature ‘look and feel’ of retro-creepiness after a spell living in Germany with limited resources. With only a couple of lights with which to work and a 1940s meat storage unit as a venue, Jack staged his first show – and the residual visual effects have stayed with him since. Back in Sydney, Jack was on the board of Archive Gallery Space, an artist run initiative in Newtown.
His adventures into the possibilities of technology, which began before art school as a hobby, have grown. He says he enjoys “quick solution engineering tools like Arduino and other interface devices” that enable him to make big light sculptures and data visualization installations. His latest foray has been into virtual reality gaming experiences. Jack’s query to himself and the industry is “what’s fantastic and weird that hasn’t been done?”
He’s found the answer as a lead developer with Sydney-based creative technology agency S1T2, working on projects including Tibrogargan - project Dreamtime, which used VR to emphasise the perspective of the user relative to the scale of the characters, and more recently Kept, a VR experience that debuted a demo at PAX Australia in 2016. Using VR and unexpected gaming narratives with a focus on storytelling and emotional engagement, the S1T2 team produces interactive experiences where a deeper, universal empathy is revealed.
Jack was one of the first developers to create virtual reality content for Epic Games and his JCInventory application that utilises the Unreal Engine continues to be one of the most popular and commercially successful 3D inventory systems available on the marketplace to date.