Alan Watts on Meow Wolf

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Arts and Entertainment Company Meow Wolf creates large-scale interactive and immersive art installations. They recently opened their fifth installation in Houston. Austin based hardware and software developer, Alan Watts, created many of their custom interactive devices, database driven platforms, and animation software. Alan joins us this time on the Plutopia podcast to discuss his work.

Alan details the extensive technical infrastructure behind Meow Wolf’s installations, emphasizing the complexity and cost of maintaining them. Watts shares insights into his creative process, including how he integrates hardware and software to develop engaging, often retro-inspired experiences. He also highlights the importance of accessibility and sustainability in Meow Wolf’s evolving approach. The conversation touches on the broader themes of creativity, digital art, and the evolving role of technology in immersive storytelling.

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Alan Watts:

You see maybe 10% of the work on the outside at Meow Wolf. And you go behind the scenes and look at the server rooms and the documents and the schematics and the one line diagrams. It’s like, oh my God, there is this like – before anything even begins production, we’ve done interactivity matrices. We’ve built out diagrams and it’s kind of amazing to see how much work goes into these and then just sustaining them too is incredibly expensive because this is stuff that’s gonna break and it’s tech and it’s very expensive to maintain. And to have the staff to do that requires that we hand things off when we’re done. So we have to hire people, and train them, that have a certain technical knowledge to be able to fix things on their own. And we’re a company of a thousand people now, across all of our locations. So it’s a beast now, it’s truly a beast.