Cat Among Animals - Live Touchdesigner Audio Visual Performance by Steve Pan & Nicholas Marriott

Описание: This is a live AV set performed by Nicholas Marriott and Steve Pan. Touchdesigner was used to create the visual elements and live coding was used for the performance aspect.

Detailed Description Follows.

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Cat Among Animals — an AV performance for said exhibition curated by Chloé at Oddany Gallery.

This performance was the third collaboration between Steve and me, furthering my pursuit of live coding. Allowing for the process and improvisation of live code guide the piece. I’ve been increasingly drawn to narrative structure in new media, exploring how story can surface through live coding’s inherent movement and shifting forms rather than technical display.

Recent experiences have also brought ideas of communal and social diffraction into focus which I looked to explore. A place where boundaries of self feel less like fixed lines and more like places that blur, or echo. In that space, self and other, past and present, human experience are never entirely separate; they cut together and apart in the same motion. The piece moves through these abstractions toward an inevitable fracture, dissolving into purposeful chaos as it sheds logic and form, until only the scream remains and the quiet admission of becoming another statistic or binary existence in someone else’s mind.

I was also heavily inspired by Enter the Void, and I shaped the narrative to more directly follow the depersonalisation of death. Following the ideas of diffraction but also how we move through the most confronting moments of our lives only to dissolve into a statistic, later deployed by others for gain, which in an effort to explore I inevitably did the same.

To express this visually, I explored atypical audio visualisation through real-time APIs and data-visualisation, pulling from community-sourced datasets such as Wikipedia, data.techforpalestine, and more. The work shifted from direct sound visualisations to recent personal mantras and footage, then abstract particles drifting through the space to a final intense burst of data-driven imagery. Using real-time data and improvised live coding became a way to introduce a literal first-time human experience unfolding in front of the audience, an unfiltered unruly journey.

Realtime continues to be a medium through which I enjoy exploring more creative uses of technology. It is a way of reclaiming tools so often tied to corporate or uninspired aesthetics and redirecting them toward new visual languages driven by curiosity and experimentation. @touchdesigner reinforces this even further; where tools like Notch or AE often fall into the traps of pure aesthetic polish, TD creates space for creative coding to genuinely flourish which I’m grateful to have the privilege of using.

I’m also endlessly grateful to everyone who came, friends and community who continue to hold these moments, and to the tools and technologies that allow us to create on this unceded land. A special thank you to Chloé for curating this exhibition with such care and for inviting us to perform, and to Oddany for offering a space that allows gatherings like this to take shape.

The entire performance is now edited and available to watch online.

Please contact me for a full list of sources.

Photography by Kelly Li @dopaminesensation
Modified Wikipedia API by me, originally developed by Steven Croker.
#touchdesigner #audiovisual #newmediaart