Alright, so I kept bumping into this name, Owain Davies, in some really old forum threads. People were talking him up like he was some kind of hidden genius, especially when it came to, I don’t know, making digital stuff feel… different. Not your usual slick and polished crap, but something with more grit, more soul, or whatever. So, I thought, okay, I’ll bite. Let’s see what this Owain Davies fella is all about.
First off, finding anything concrete was a nightmare. Seriously. It’s like the guy existed before easy archiving or something. Most of what I found were just whispers, mentions here and there. No big official website, no clear manifestos. Just fragments. It felt like I was on some kind of digital archaeological dig. I spent a good week, no joke, just sifting through dead links and ancient Usenet archives. Talk about a time sink.
Eventually, I pieced together a few recurring ideas that seemed to be attributed to him. Stuff like:
- Embrace the glitches: Don’t smooth everything out. Let the imperfections show. He apparently thought that’s where the “realness” was.
- Non-linear narratives (but REALLY non-linear): Not just choose-your-own-adventure, but stuff that barely made sense sequentially. More like a dream.
- User as an unwilling participant: This one was weird. The idea that the user shouldn’t always feel in control or comfortable. Challenge them, confuse them a bit.
So, I had this little interactive story thing I was fiddling with. Just a small project, nothing major. I decided, what the heck, let’s try to inject some of this Owain Davies “philosophy” into it. I started by intentionally messing with the navigation. Made some links almost invisible, others would lead to unexpected places. I even threw in some visual elements that looked like rendering errors. My thinking was, “Okay, Owain, let’s see your ‘glitch art’ magic.”
And you know what? It was… interesting. And frustrating. For me, the creator, it was kinda liberating to not care about making everything perfect and user-friendly. But when I showed a tiny bit of it to a friend, they were just confused. “Is this broken?” they asked. Yeah, that was the point, sort of. But maybe I went too far, or maybe I just didn’t get the Davies magic sauce quite right.
The whole experience was a weird one. I spent ages hunting for info, then tried to apply these half-baked principles. Did it revolutionize my project? Nah, not really. It mostly just made it more obscure. But it did make me think. Think about why everything today has to be so damn polished and predictable. Maybe this Owain Davies, whoever he really was or is, had a point. Maybe there’s something to be said for making things a bit rough around the edges, a bit more challenging.
I’m still not sure if I’m an Owain Davies convert. Probably not. My stuff still ended up being mostly understandable in the end because, well, I actually want people to use it. But digging into his supposed ideas was a trip. A confusing, time-consuming trip, but a trip nonetheless. Makes you wonder how many other “Owain Davies”-type figures are out there, with their weird ideas lost to the digital winds.
