TDNeuron – A Gradient Descent Into Madness – Darien Brito and Tim Gerritsen

Workshop: TDNeuron – A Gradient Descent Into Madness
Assets: TDNeuron is now available in the COMMUNITY section of Derivative’s website.
https://derivative.ca/community-post/asset/tdneuron

Machine Learning is taking over as a new means for creative and artistic practice. Many platforms already exist that make it relatively easy for programmers to use and integrate in projects. Nevertheless, as mere users of these platforms, we are often left with a superficial understanding of how the algorithms truly work and what the possibilities and potentials of a given model are. This workshop primarily aims to fill in some of these conceptual gaps and provide a gentle introduction to how machine learning works and how it can be implemented from scratch.

After this foundation is established workshop presenters, Darien Brito and TIm Gerritsen, will demonstrate TDNeuron, an open-source effort they want to share with the community. It offers enough tools to dive deeply into the algorithms of machine learning or to use them from a high level without worrying too much about the details. The instructors will show how these algorithms can be implemented and used natively in TouchDesigner.

TDNeuron will soon be open-sourced online. Brito and Gerritsen want to invite all enthusiasts of the project to contribute their ideas, remarks, comments, and code.

Instructor: Darien Brito and Tim Gerritsen
Darien Brito
Darien Brito creates pieces that combine sound and image. His creative practice is motivated and informed by computers and technology. He is equally an artist and a technician, a distinction he regards as becoming less necessary as the field of digital practice continues to evolve. Brito is fascinated by micro-sound, immersive environments, machine learning, and complexity (that is, the field that studies how systems with simple rules can create complex behaviour over time). He is interested in an experiential approach to performance, specializing in artistic occurrences that are less guided by concepts and based more on sensorial experiences. In parallel, Brito acts as a consultant on various programming languages. He builds solutions for people with great ideas but who lack the technical expertise to make them happen.

Tim Gerritsen
Tim Gerritsen (1982) has been flipping bits ever since he was able to touch a keyboard. Starting on the Commodore 64 in the late 80s, his interest grew from computer security and webdevelopment to artificial intelligence and creative programming.

As a creative coder, Tim helped realizing several installations for clients like Coca-cola, Philips, T-mobile, Volvo and BMW.

He’s the co-founder of the newly formed Dutch studio yfx lab and is mainly focussing on the development of TouchDesigner c++ plugins, GLSL shaders and system architecture.
Tim is also actively involved in the development of TDNeuron, an opensource machine learning framework purely written in TouchDesigner using GLSL.

Tim Gerritsen currently lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.