Projects and Approach
Building a Calibration UI
You're finally ready to do a big gig, or a medium gig, or just a gig. After months of practicing and playing you're feeling good about your creative work, and you've got a solid idea for the artwork in your installation. There is, however, one major catch. You have to calibrate a bunch of a projectors… five. When you started working with TouchDesigner you were initially excited about the artwork and interactivity, but now suddenly you're facing the reality that you need to build out some tools (or at least modify some existing ones), put together a UI, and think through how you're going to organize a project that goes beyond just experimentation and exploration.
Revel in this moment; it's the start of a whole new set of challenges and considerations, and it's also the beginning of a move away from tinkering to considered building.
In seriousness, where is this coming from? Recently I had the opportunity to help a team at a University that was putting together an installation in South America. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to do the whole project but I did have enough bandwidth to help get a calibration interface and pipeline set up so their creative developer could focus on the artwork and user interaction elements. Building calibration interfaces isn't sexy on the face of it, but when calibration is working well it takes a tremendous amount of pressure off the creative end of the project. It also allows us to define some fixed elements in the project, establish some modular elements, and define an architecture.
Mantarraya
In late March of 2014 I got an email from the organizers of Proyecta in Peubla Mexico. Due to some unforeseen circumstances they were down an artist, and wondered if I'd be interested in collaborating on a new piece for their projection festival May 9th, 10th, and 11th. The site they had in mind is called the Mantarraya (Manta-ray). This large public park overlooks down-town Puebla, and is a rolling expanse 75 meters square of wooden decking that rise and roll in true surrealistic form. This rolling wooden landscape feels almost ocean like as you sit on the benches - the horizon and the deck creating a disorienting vision of a modernist vista. Interspersed throughout the deck are trees and large pillar lights that further accent the strangely haunting topography in front of you.
Inside Wonder Dome
In approaching some of the many challenges of Wonder Dome one of the most pressing and intimidating was how to approach programming media playback for a show with a constant media presence. One of the challenges we had embraced as a team for this project was using Derivative's TouchDesigner as our primary programming environment for show-control. TouchDesigner, like most programming environments, has very few limitations in terms of what you can make and do, but it also requires that you know what it is that you want to make and to do. Another challenge was the fact that while our team was full of bright and talented designers, I was the person with the broadest TouchDesigner experience. One of the hard conversations that Dan and I had during a planning meeting centered around our choices of programming environments and approaches for Wonder Dome. I told Dan that I was concerned that I would end up building an interface / patch that no one else knew how to use, fix, or program. This is one of the central challenges of a media designer - how to do you make sure that you're building something that can be used / operated by another person. I wish there were an easy answer to this question, but sadly this is one situation that doesn't have simple answers. The solution we came to was for me to do the programming and development - start to finish. For a larger implementation I think we could have developed an approach that would have divided some of the workload, but for this project there just wasn't enough time for me to both teach the other designers how to use / program in TouchDesigner and to do the programming needed to ensure that we could run the show. Dan pointed out in his thesis paper on this project that our timeline shook out to just 26 days from when we started building the content of the show until we opened.
Sculpture
In the ever growing list of tools that I'm experimenting with Derivative's TouchDesigner is a tool that time and again keeps coming up as something that's worth learning, experimenting with, and developing competencies around it's work flow. TD is a nodal environmental called a network. Inside of the network nodes can be directly connected by by exporting parameters.
The Container, Control, and Final Output
In thinking about how to meet the objectives that I had for this piece, one of my central questions was how to make sure that I could move through three cued scenes - either with manual or automatic triggers. I knew that I had three different aesthetic environments that I wanted to move through. I explored several different options, and the one that ultimately made sense to me given my current level of proficiency (at this point I had only been programming in Touch for a total of three weeks) in TouchDesigner was to use a cross fading approach.
The Individual Composited Scene
There are always large questions to answer when thinking about creating an interactive work: Who is it for? What does it look likes? What are you trying to communicate? How much instruction do you provide, how little instruction do you provide? And on and on. As I started to think about how this piece was going to work as an installation rather than as a performance apparatus, I started by thinking about what kind of data I could use to drive the visual elements of this work. One of the sensors that I knew I could easily incorporate into my current sculptural configuration was a an iPod Touch. The Touch has an on-board gyroscope and accelerometer. After a conversation with my adviser (Jake Pinholster) we decided that this would be a direction of exploration worth pulling apart, and from there I went back to TouchDesigner to start thinking about how I wanted to incorporate live data into the piece I was making.
The Underlying Geometry
One of the benefits of working with TouchDesigner is the ability to work in 3D. 3D objects are in the family of operators called SOPs - Surface Operators. One of the aesthetic directions that I wanted to explore was the feeling of looking into a long box. The world inside of this box would be characterized by examining artifacts as either particles or waves with a vaguely dual-slit kind of suggestion. With that as a starting point I headed into making the container for these worlds of particles and waves.
Time Trigger Creating a time based trigger in TouchDesigner can be accomplished a ton of ways, and this is just one of them