London’s Music Hackspace has kicked off a series of free TouchDesigner meetups – and anyone can join from anywhere online. Today’s episode is on at 5 pm London time (check that world clock!), featuring kinetic installations.
Berlin’s Bileam Tschepe, aka elekktronaut, curated this one, and it features:
- Patrik Lechner is working on dynamic 3D projection mapping and a Rotor (seen above at the Satosphere—image by S.A.T. Ash KG (subtletherapy.com). He’s also the author of Multimedia Programming Using Max/MSP and TouchDesigner.
- Ben Forest and Matt Ross of Volvox Labs, doing some fun stuff with robots and kinetic sculptures. (See also the excellent AV project ARIADNE) Robot performance, below.
- Timo Lejeune of Lumus Instruments and and Boris Acket: Designing Kinetic Installations
The workshop is free hosted in Discord. Check the link for information on how to join plus code of conduct, and some links to the projects in case you can’t make it:
TouchDesigner Meetup – Kinetic Installations
Actually, it’s funny – a friend mentioned in a talk recently that she was part of the “1%” of people privileged enough to do media art. I get that, but then I also wondered about it. We have a lot of tools that you can access for free (TouchDesigner has a free noncommercial license), tons of people now have capable machines of one kind another, and we’re gradually seeing languages other than English (sorry). The robots aren’t necessarily for everyone, but we can make this information accessible to a lot of folks – especially given the punk side of media like live coding and other AV approaches.
In the end, we’re talking about reaching a handful of people, not any big percentage. (1% is also, you know, 80 million people.) But that’s also the point.
I’m just also glad these folks have made a business out of this, and none of this looks like it’ll be replaced by AI. So enjoy!