TOUCHDESIGNER: Artist Recreation

Project 4: Artist Recreation
School of Art, Media, and Technology
BFA DT Interactive and Immersive environments
PSAM 3274 TouchDesigner Spring 2024
with Torin Blankensmith

Note: this uses TouchDesigner Version 2023.11600

See my tutorial here: https://youtu.be/uv8_3bVB5rk

I was mainly inspired by Camille Utterback’s installations, in which she uses different texts, icons, images, etc., to create abstract symbolic systems, as well as our relationship with interfaces and symbolic systems of the machines. I really like her exploration of the connections between physical bodies and digital spaces. I was trying to recreate her installation, Visual Resolve, 2000, an abstracted version of the participants created on the screen, where she explores the levels of the icons and the overall image.

I started by following Polyhop’s ASCII Effect tutorial, and instead of using ASCII characters, I used images. I started using photos of meat (suggested by Jocelyn during our conversation), but I struggled with finding a larger concept that explores similar topics/areas the artist does. After talking to Torin about how to continue pushing this project, I wanted to connect this to a project I worked on in Fall 2023. I made a book on magnification and created a physical form (a book) and a digital form (website) to explore the intersection of perception, art, and science. The microscope bridges multiple disciplines by acting as an artistic and scientific tool. The book plays with the variations of sizes that direct the viewer’s interaction with the pages. With this TouchDesigner project, I want to explore how magnification can be experimented with and how it challenges our visual perception in a digital space.

For this project, I followed basically all of Polyhop’s ASCII Effect in TouchDesigner tutorial on YouTube, but for my project, I need to add my own element to it as well. After Torin mentioned Powers of Ten, I wanted to look at the book I made last semester and create another version/part of that concept on TouchDesigner. I wanted to add MediaPipe as a part of my experimentation with visual perception. I also used images by an artist I looked at in the book, Carl Strüwe, instead of using ASCII characters.

Find an easier way to add the image files to the project instead of going into each base and changing the image source. Maybe there could be a system for using different sets of images so that the visuals can change more, could be according to the person or the mode, and create a system in TouchDesigner that is similar to Camille Utterback’s work where new icons can be loaded into the program easily to create different visuals.

See polyhop’s ASCII Effect in TouchDesigner tutorial here: https://youtu.be/LzcZBvc0WqY?si=zmuCny_Sz10PVFXZ
See Torin Blankensmith’s MediaPipe Plugin Tutorial here: https://youtu.be/YBozwTrm4Dc?si=v64wie_pRXUU8a3H