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TouchDesigner at Day For Night, a Preview

The second edition of Day For Night taking place December 17-18 in Houston, Texas will host an incredible lineup of sound and visual artists and prominently featured in the "Light" section are some very exciting projects from the TouchDesigner community.

Saint Petersburg art collective TUNDRA bring their lasers and artistry to North Americ for the first time, NYC-based AV&C + Houze return to Day for Night (d4n) with mirrors, motors and projections, Ezra Miller adapts his WebGL generative art to bigger real-time screens, VT Pro Design with a secret project fly in from LA, and Colin Hoy programs and controls the festivals' interstitial screens at all the stages! TouchDesigner is indeed 'in the house'!

Whatever we can reveal at this time we do so below along with a samling of past works from the artists. Much more to come on all these installations during and following d4n (many surprises in store!). 

TUNDRA

TUNDRA brings "OUTLINES" a laser installation originally designed for the same-named festival in Moscow earlier this summer that to our collective and immense distress was stopped before it could start by local authorities. Looking forward to finally being able to witness it in person!

From the program: St.Petersburg based collaborative artistic collective, focused on creating spaces and experiences by exploring facets of interaction between audio and visuals with human emotions.We specialize in multi­media performances and interactive audio­visual installations.Our multidisciplinary team involves musicians, sound engineers, programmers and visual artists. The team is known for works presented at festivals of multi­media art in Russia, Asia and Europe.

Most of Tundra's projects have been premiered, reviewed and highly acclaimed by high profile media like Creators Project, FastCoDesign, Creative Applications, LSN and many others. One of the first works by TUNDRA collective ("The Void") was shown at the prestigious 10thInternational Media Festival Mapping Festival (Geneva, Switzerland, 2014). The video of this project was included in the ArtFutura Festival (Spain, 2014) program.In 2014/15, TUNDRA presented their first large­ scale sound and light kinetic sculptures HALO and HYPERJUMP at HPL Festival (Museum of Street Art) and at the First Cadet Corps (St.Petersburg), Mira Festival (Berlin). Which led to a massive collaboration with Moscow based SILA SVETA team on the EPICENTER project atARMA17 (Moscow, 2015) TUNDRA's permanent installations have been exhibited at Center MARS (Moscow), Etagi Art Center (Saint­Petersburg) and D­Museum (Seoul)."

TUNDRA and on the Derivative Blog

AV&C NYC + VINCENT HOUZE

"Returning to Day for Night, AV&C's Stephen Baker and David Bianciardi join forces again with long time collaborator, Vincent Houzé, to further explore the themes of light, volume and space that brought our 2015 collaboration, lull, to life. Our newest immersive environment, phases, introduces robotic mirror arrays, folding complex light patterns into an evolving dimensional kaleidoscope.

AV&C is a New York based experiential design and technology studio recognized for digital landmarks in the physical world. We create tightly integrated and responsive architectural interventions for brands, architects, and artists. Vincent Houzé uses modern computer graphics techniques to create interactive art, performances, and large-scale multimedia installations. His practice centers on dynamic simulations and systems in which simple rules give rise to complexity, richness, and realistic motion in his work."

AV&C Vincent Houzé and also on the Derivative Blog

EZRA MILLER

"Imagine the above" we are told... "but on an 80-foot wall and instead of me waving my arms around it'll be a video feed of Aphex Twin or Björk."

From the program: "Ezra Miller is a 20-year-old artist and designer from Chicago. He creates interactive, generative art on the Internet using WebGL. He is fascinated by reflections, refractions, moiré patterns, and feedback loops. He is currently a sophomore at NYU Gallatin where he is concentrating on Digital Art, with a focus on computer graphics, art, and design."

Ezra has only very recently started to use TouchDesigner and was kind enough to tell us a bit about his experience to date and what he's planning for d4n: "I made my piece with TouchDesigner. It's basically just using TOPs in an attempt to simulate the stuff I do in WebGL using mostly fragment shaders. I really like TouchDesigner because it saves a ton of time because you don't have to code out individual frame buffers and stuff, so it was really great to use for this project.

The piece takes in a camera feed and performs an optical flow algorithm on the feed to detect the motion of objects in the feed. It uses this optical flow to control a few things. It goes into a shader feedback loop that creates a textural "painting," mixing together about 100 image textures which I've taken over the course of a few months living in NYC. This textural composition is fed into another shader feedback loop that performs a sort-of reaction diffusion system on it, whose direction and flow is controlled by the optical flow shader. The camera feed controls the color and flow, allowing you to "paint" with your body. Super excited for people to see how it looks!"

VT PRO DESIGN

Very excited that our immensely skilled and very inventive friends from VT Pro will be in attendance this year no doubt up to something very cool. At this time there's a complete seal on what that might be though rumor has that it may be an interactive lighting and audio piece driven by TouchDesigner.

Earlier this year, VT Pro produced the really far-out kinetic "living wall" 'Reach' an interactive installation that used sophisticated digital and mechanical design and responded to the actions of viewers approaching it. Developed for the Future Forward series from The Creators Project and Prius, this tactile and organic work, was inspired by the idea that technology can respond and act upon the earth’s environment in a mutually beneficial and harmonious way. (We definitely need more of that!)Learn more about the series here.

COLIN HOY

The above screen caps are of the system developed by Colin Hoy to handle the interstitial content for all of the DayForNight stages. "The system will mainly be handling all the content playback for the main 'Red, Green, and Blue' stages between artist performances, etc. However, it will also handle the control and nearly all of the content on a massive dual projected wall 100% of the time.

The system is capable of allowing an operator to preview each output individually with all of the visual elements available to choose from before transitioning it live. Likewise, it has the ability to control the content that is currently live as well. The UI is not fully built-out, but the core structure will remain similar to the screenshots.

Many realtime and interactive elements are available to display such as live typing, SMS label roulette, countdown timers, generative design/gradient patterns, wayfinding, zooming type, etc. Likewise, an array of movieclips can be played back and layered with other visual elements.

The core of the network is programmed via an extension - which I've included in the preview of the extension in the screencaps. The main idea behind the network was to create an all encompassing playback system with a user friendly interface so that mostly any operator could fully preview and display content easily.

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