
Ask Gabrielle (Gabby) Odowichuk what her favourite project is to date and the project engineer for Limbic Media will likely laugh and say it’s whatever she worked on last. Right now, that project is a tunnel of interactive, illuminated hoops she and her team installed along a cliffside walkway at the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver.
Odowichuk is one of the creative brains at Victoria’s Limbic Media, a company famous for dreaming up big, impactful public art installations where movement, light, sound and visuals respond to human stimulus. At Limbic, Odowichuk is at the forefront of the interactive technology field, embodying the right blend of talent, ability and playfulness to bring companies’ installations to life.
“It continues to be onwards and upwards for us,” she says. “The projects are getting larger and more exciting as we go. Maybe that’s why the newest ones are always my favourite.”
While a passion for the clarinet first guided her into the music department at UVic, Odowichuk missed the challenges of math and science and soon transferred into the university’s engineering department, where her background made her a perfect candidate for the degree’s computer music option. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a masters of applied science in the same, Odowichuk began to focus on the use of human motion and gesture to control sound and music. Her graduate research gained her entry to a TEDx exhibition where she first met her future employers — Limbic founders Justin Love and Manjinder Benning.
Now she spends her days writing software with Limbic’s development team and doing research and development on whatever product they’ve been tasked with dreaming up. From the initial stages in the lab, Odowichuk follows a project through to installation and completion. She regularly bounces around North America to ensure proper set-up and execution of the artistic undertakings she and her team have created.
“It’s always really fun to take a step back and watch people interacting with something — especially right after you finish it,” she says. “I think there’s a bit of feeling proud [of] creating these moments for people — creating joy and creating reaction.”
This article is from the February/March 2020 issue of Douglas.