Studio Project · 2025–2026
A series of sixteen digital artifacts authored in TouchDesigner — feedback loops, particle fields, wave permutations, and image-driven compositions — installed as a projection mapping over a dense, cluttered clipping wall, with white paper sheets pinned in to act as discrete screens.
01 · Framing
The brief asks us to take digital binary as a medium with its own grain — to notice where it bends under the weight of our intent, where small initial states explode into different endings, and where one parameter quietly steers another. These are the four lenses I tried to keep open while making every artifact in this library.
Each theme is a small system pushed in different directions — a single particle field re-tuned in saturation, density, gravity, or feedback strength until it becomes an unrelated cousin of itself.
I came in wanting clean shapes. The toolset kept handing me noise, smear, and accidental beauty. Most of these pieces are the conversation between what I planned and what TouchDesigner agreed to.
A single seed value, a feedback amount nudged from 0.94 to 0.96, an extra noise octave — the same patch produces a starfield, then a galaxy, then a static smear. Tiny edits, very loud results.
Audio level steers brightness; brightness steers feedback; feedback steers everything. The patch is less a picture and more a small graph of mutual influence — the artifact is what falls out of it.
02 · The Library
All clips loop and play silently. Click any tile to enlarge it. The grid is intentionally uneven — tall, square, and wide outputs sit next to each other, the way they were authored, with their native aspect ratios preserved.
03 · Projection Installation
Across from the studio there is a clipping wall — taped photographs, screenshots, printed posters, magazine pages, sticky notes. We rented a projector and used the wall itself as the canvas, but pinned plain white paper sheets across it so the projected artifacts had clean little screens to land on, while the surrounding clutter bled through and around them.
04 · Building Process
Each artifact starts in TouchDesigner — a small patch of TOPs and CHOPs, often a feedback loop with one or two control parameters exposed. I let it run, capture screen recordings of the parameter space, and only then choose which permutations to keep.
From dozens of recordings I pulled four families: a concentric-eye theme, particle fields, wave permutations, and image/text experiments. Each family is the same patch reshaped, rather than four unrelated pieces.
White paper sheets were taped to the clipping wall as soft screens. The projector was aligned and each sheet got its own artifact, sized to its rectangle, so the wall reads as a small grid of living posters inside the surrounding paper noise.
05 · Reflection
Permutation happened almost on its own. Once a patch was running, dragging a single slider gave me ten variations in twenty seconds. It taught me that a digital artifact is rarely a single object — it's a slice through a parameter space, and the choice of which slice is the actual authorial decision.
Intention survived only partially. I planned controlled, geometric outputs; what I got was often noisier, softer, more accidental. TouchDesigner's affordances — feedback, blur, displace — pull every image toward smear and fog. The artifacts you see here are the truce.
Complexity was the most surprising. Two of the particle fields are the same patch with a feedback amount changed from 0.94 to 0.97. The visual difference is enormous: one stays as discrete dots, the other smears into a galaxy. Three percent of one parameter, an entirely different artifact.
Control ended up being a graph rather than a knob. Brightness drove feedback, feedback drove particle lifetime, lifetime drove density. Once that little network is wired, the artifact almost composes itself — my role becomes choosing where in time to take a snapshot.
The projection mapping, finally, returned the digital images to a physical body. On a clean wall they would have been just videos. On a wall already covered in paper — printouts, photos, torn pages — the artifacts had to negotiate with that clutter, and the white sheets became their bodies, the way an email is the body of a thought that began as a letter.