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TouchDesigner Event Berlin 2024 in Pictures

 

WATCH ALL THE VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE

 
The TouchDesigner Event Berlin 2024 took place May 21 to May 23. It was an intimate gathering of about 100 participants who joined for 3 days and nights to share new work and ideas, inspire and educate, and to gather in person for intensive TouchDesigner community time.
The conference's first day was a (Big Surprise) workshop day where the new TouchDesigner operator family POPs was announced and participants given the opportunity to explore and test-drive the new features. The subsequent two days hosted a program of presentations from the community during the day, complemented by two very special evenings of inspired entertainment at a couple of our favourite Berlin venues: Studio 1111 and MONOPOL Berlin.
The Derivative team came out in full force with Greg Hermanovic, Markus Heckmann, Isabelle Rousset, Malcolm Bechard, Ben Voigt and Eric Bonn in attendance. Once again we partnered with our friends at The NODE Institute who undertook operations on the ground and with MONOMANGO who graciously hosted us at their beautiful HOLON space. Also a big thank you to Marta Pang, our official event photographer. All photos here are credited to Marta Pang.

 

_DAY 1 | MAY 21 | Workshop | forum factory

Workshop: Introducing POPs a New TouchDesigner Operator Family

 

The introduction of POPs to as the Berlin Day 1 workshop was a bit of a surprise attack – (almost) nobody knew what they were there for.  We announced it as “some new stuff in TouchDesigner” and started to lure a good variety of people in.

A year ago we had conceived to have a surprise release event for POPs as we had been developing it since July 2022 and thought it would need another year to evolve into a state where we were ready for people to test drive it.  And that certainly happened – thanks everyone for banging on it and contributing.

The POPs dev team including Vincent Houze, Malcolm Bechard and Greg Hermanovic, and for a while David Braun and recently-joined Guillaume Lussier. It was originally thought of as a GPU particle system but it quickly went well beyond  that.

Big shout-out to our very important alpha-testers who helped to push the development and bring their deep knowledge to the table, and to Keith Lost, Idzard Kwadijk and Roy and Tim Gerritsen for their brilliant assets and contributions to the workshop. 

_DAY 2 | MAY 22 | DAY PROGRAM | Holon  

Day 2 of the Event took place at HOLON and was the first of two days of presentations on an impressive range of timely topics from our community stars. This part of the conference was live-streamed and video recordings of the presentations can be watched on our YouTube channel and complete artist bio and talk descriptions can be found on the Event webpage. 

Simon Alexander Adams, USA | The Art Of TouchDesigner Games (40 Min)
Stanislav Glazov, DE | Puristic Stable Diffusion Integraion Into TouchDesigner Using The Internal Python (20 Min)
Chagall Van Den Berg, NL | B.A.B.Y.: Real-time Motion Capture In An AV Performance (20 Min)
Mickey Van Olst, NL | Zen And The Art Of TouchDesigner-tools (40 Min)
Greg Hermanovic, CA | Introducing Pops, A New Feature Set In TouchDesigner (20 Min)
Harvey Moon, USA | Sustainable Systems (20 Min)
Soyun Park, NL | Teaching TouchDesigner Beyond Practicality (40 Min)

Watch video recordings of the first day's presentations here

_NIGHT 2 | 19:00 IMMERSIVE VJ NIGHT @ STUDIO 1111

Following the daytime programming at HOLON the first evening's festivities adjourned to Studio11:11, an innovative immersive club experience in Berlin featuring a 16,000-pixel-wide screen spanning 270° of the club's interior. Media artist MXZEHN, co-founder of the NODE Institute partnered with Studio 11:11 to offer a course focused on exploring diverse techniques and aesthetic concepts for delivering live visuals that merge cinematic grandeur with playful improvisation, even at challenging resolutions. While this workshop took place online, participants were at the venue to show their work - the results from the course - and invited the community for this amazing evening of live visual performances, music, camaraderie, and refreshments.

Notable also is that Mickey Van Olst designed the custom TouchDesigner framework and authoring tool to allow people to plug in their components, connect with input devices, schedule things and generally run the show. Watch the recording of Mickey's presentation to learn more.

Big shoutout to the VJ team: Linda Nicolai, Raquel Fernandez Caamano, Javier Martinez, Stella Speziali, Raul Leal, Arianna Rattazzi, Nancy El Azzi, Nicola Bisset and Nicola Carpeggiani for the inspired visual performances and to the brilliant Studio 11:11 team Friederike Schultz, Till Harter, Linda Nicolai for this stunning venue and night.

_DAY 3 | MAY 23 | DAY PROGRAM | Holon

The second day of prensentations at HOLON saw another stellar lineup of diverse presentations which can all be viewed on our YouTube Channel.

Oliver Ellmers, UK | TouchDesigner In Virtual Production (40 Min)
Aurelian Ionus, RO | Fluid Simulation In TOPs (20 Min)
Bileam Tschepe, DE | Imperfection And Digital Art (20 Min)
Keith Lostracco, CA & Idzard Kwadijk, NL | TouchPy (40 Min)
Weidi Zhang, USA | Interactive AI Art (20 Min)
Lyell Hintz, USA | Creating Tools For Other Artists (20 Min)
Volvoxlabs, USA | The Power Of TouchDesigner In Crafting Successful Multidisciplinary Projects (40 Min)

 

_night 3 | 20:00 | monopol open Dragons night
Our final night of celebrations was one to remember... an almost surreal night where MONOPOL Berlin, LED Pulse, and DEREAL Studio collaborated to extend a special invitation to the community for an evening of celebration and exploration amidst a captivating scenography featuring 70 Dragon O² modules suspended in MONOPOL's magnificent Bunker Hall. Event participants were able ahead of time to download a package allowing them to prepare content to play on the LED volumes that night.
_Dankeschön  
And now for the most important part...
An event such as this can only happen because of all the people involved. Therefore, without our wonderful community we would not be having these very important get-togethers and life would be a lot less interesting and friendly :)
So, when it comes to thank yous the list includes each and every participant who put their time, resources and energies towards joining us in Berlin - thank you for participating with all of your enthusiasm and good will!
A very massive shoutout and thanks to our presenters for sharing their time, knowledge, experience and endless energy with the rest of us. Without you we'd have no community and likely no software either! So from the bottom of our hearts thank you to:
Simon Alexander Adams I Oliver Ellmers | Roy & Tim Gerritsen | Stanislav Glazov | Lyell Hintz | Ildar Iakubov | Aurelian Ionus | Idzard Kwadijk | Keith Lostracco | Harvey Moon | Soyun Park | Bileam Tschepe | Chagall van Den Berg | Mickey van Olst | Volvoxlabs | Weidi Zhang
And to our quickfire presenters for your rapid response and rising to the occassion:
Erik Eggeling | Colas Fitzmann | Jacques Hoepffner | Kohui | Ori Ben Shabat | Ronen Tanchum
To our hardworking and always enthusiastic super team of volunteers we cannot thank you enough you guys made our days smooth and friendly: Ploypapus Pohsry, Stephen Bontly, Ana Mikatadze, David Krajcik, Lorenzo, Aner Shahar, Antonia Angel, Kunal Singh and Leo Andermane.
A very special thank you to Roy Gerritsen for working with us on the Event branding and typography, for using TouchDesigner (of course) to make all the images and movies used to promote the event, and for generally being available and enthusiastic to help always.
To our event photographer Marta Pang who spent 3 days and 2 nights tirelessly documenting everything that happened and all the people involved. The memories you helped to create and capture are invaluable - a very big thank you for all of your energies, keen eye and community spirit
To the amazing team at Studio 11:11, Friederike Schultz, Till Harter, Linda Nicolai, thank you for creating such a great space - a place that we wished existed in every city in the world - and for inviting us for an evening of community engagement, performance, live visuals and FUN!
In the same breath another big thank you to Stefan Kraus' exceptional VJ course students and the visual performances you shared with us that night. Linda Nicolai, Raquel Fernandez Caamano, Javier Martinez, Stella Speziali, Raul Leal, Arianna Rattazzi, Nancy El Azzi, Nicola Bisset and Nicola Carpeggiani we were inspired and impressed and had a very good night and your contribution was paramount!
A very big thank you to MONOPOL and José Alarcón for graciously hosting our closing night event. It was love at first sight when we first saw your venue last year and the oportunity to have our own community event there this year was very exciting. Thank you for making everything so easy and pleasant and José for being always such a great host and for supplying the traditional closing party bottle of mezcal <3.To Danilo Grande and the LEDPulse team for making your ferociously cool Dragons available for our participants to play with, to the DEREAL Studio team and Dan Molnar for doing all the hard work to make this play time even possible Thank you guys so much!
To our gracious hosts MONOMANGO for sharing their HOLON space again with us this year. It's such a pleasure to be able to hold our conference in your beautiful space.

And finally, big love and a MASSIVE thank you to Stefan Kraus, Harshini Karunaratne and Wieland Hilker of The NODE Institute not only for all the work you put in to help us realize this Event, but for everything else that you do year in and out to further the growth of our TouchDesigner community. A special shoutout to Wieland for all the care he puts in to livestreaming and recording the 2 days of presentations at HOLON. Being able to include the community around the world during the Event is so important and having the videos to share afterwards is priceless. Thank you all so much!!

<3

_Partners and Supporters

We would like to thank our partners who have made this event possible. We started planning the TouchDesigner Event Berlin 2023 about a month and a half before it was scheduled to happen and it could not remotely have happened were it not for our friends and collaborators in Berlin who graciously shared their time, expertise and resources with us.

The NODE Institute

We are enormously indebted to the hard work put in by The NODE Institute's Stefan Kraus, Harshini Karunaratne and Wieland Hilker who undertook all of the operations on the ground including the sourcing of venues, the procurement of equipment and setting all of that up, live streaming, ticketing on our behalf and countless other tasks.

The NODE Institute empowers the creative software community to share knowledge and growth.By hosting user meetups, workshops, webinars and online courses, the Institute functions as a hub for creatives at the intersection of art and technology.

The NODE Institute is run by designers David Brüll and Stefan Kraus with the mission to empower the visual programming communities.

https://thenodeinstitute.org

https://www.facebook.com/thenodeinstitute

https://www.instagram.com/thenodeinstitute

MONOMANGO

It's not easy to find the perfect space (on very short notice) to stage an event like this and we are very grateful to MONOMANGO for accommodating us with their wonderful event space HOLON and for their warm hospitality in hosting the TouchDesigner Event Berlin 2023

HOLON is an interdisciplinary format for research and play. It uses virtual instruments to support knowledge transfer, collaboration, and connect people between the virtual and physical spheres.

MONOMANGO is a Berlin-based creative agency and production studio, comprising of visual designers, music composers, and creative technologists. Founded by Lois Kainhuber, Jan Weber and Olivier Fröhlich in 2006, the company has since realized international showcases for major brands. More recently, they established HOLON, an interdisciplinary event format, and immersive instruments, which combines real-time visualization with tactile human interfaces to navigate virtual spheres.

https://www.holon.berlin

https://monomango.de

https://www.immersive-instruments.de

STUDIO 11:11

Studio1111 offers a groundbreaking immersive art and club experience in Berlin, featuring a 16,000-pixel-wide screen that envelops 270° of the club's interior. It is designed to serve as a playground for the live visual community and experimental audio- visual performances.

https://www.instagram.com/studio1111berlin  

MONOPOL

In Berlin, there are still large, enchanting industrial sites that have remained inactive for years, anticipating a new purpose. Among these locations is MONOPOL – a former distillery situated in Reinickendorf, which has transformed into a beacon of audio-visual exploration and stunning light art in recent times.https://monopol-berlin.com/en

LED PULSE

The forward-thinking company specializes in crafting immersive light experiences to elevate human-machine interaction. In pursuit of this goal, LED Pulse's engineers and designers have developed the world's most advanced volumetric LED display, known as the Dragon O². This innovative technology seamlessly integrates with TouchDesigner, offering users a straightforward process for access and utilization.https://www.ledpulse.com

DEREAL Studio

A dedicated team of interactive media and audio engineers, visual artists, web developers and system designers, specialized in interactive installations, projection mapping and new media art that transforms both public and private spaces into immersive worlds.

https://derealstudio.com