Artist Ashley Pinnick From Tilt Brush To Starship Home

In 2014 while she was still in college, artist Ashley Pinnick asked her mom to meet someone at a 7-Eleven to pick up an Oculus Rift DK2 for her from a Craigslist ad.

As she hooked the headset up to her Mac, back before Oculus stopped supporting that platform, Pinnick quickly found her last year of college work shifting to realizing her art in VR.

“I kind of ended up just falling into it out of curiosity and intrigue of this space that was kind of reopening,” Pinnick said. “Because I was aware of kind of the virtuality era of VR, if I remember correctly, you know back in the 1990s when I was a young kid and seeing this kind of new wave was super interesting to me."

Her work has become a fundamental part of a string of projects including Tilt Brush, Cosmonious High, Color Space, Starship Home and more. Over the course of our roughly 45-minute conversation we cover her journey and advice to artists who might be discovering VR for the first time in 2026.

“I just want to see more people making their weird art and their weird games. I want everybody to have that support so that they can make great art that needs to be seen, especially with just all the darkness in the world,” Pinnick said. "I think that having a point of view and having something you want to share, having taste, that kind of stuff is applicable across so many different mediums, so many different spaces. It transcends tools. It transcends software."

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