Building a world around a website
Learning TouchDesigner is changing how I think about presenting the studio's work.
I have been learning TouchDesigner for a little while now, mostly through experiments that had nothing to do with client work.
At first I just wanted to understand what I was looking at. The networks felt completely insane, so most of the process was opening things, changing things, breaking things and slowly beginning to understand what each part was actually doing.
I started with audio-reactive objects, then particles, materials, imported 3D models, environments and camera movement. Every experiment gave me one more piece of the program that felt a little less foreign than it did before.
I think what kept me interested was how different it felt from the tools I normally use. With a website I am usually thinking about structure, hierarchy, interaction and how somebody moves through information. TouchDesigner made me think much more about atmosphere, movement, depth and what it feels like to be inside something.
Oftalmo Isla was the first time those two things really crossed over for me.
I had already been working on the website and wanted to present it in a way that felt like more than another screen recording or mockup. So I started building somewhere for the website to exist instead.
The result became this dark environment with the website on a large screen in the middle, particles moving through the space, reflections underneath it and a camera slowly moving toward everything.
It changed constantly while I was working on it. Some materials worked, others didn't. The camera took a lot of adjusting. The reflections changed the scene more than I expected. Even close to the end I was still deciding what needed to stay and what was only making the whole thing busier.
The useful part for me wasn't whether the finished piece became the perfect TouchDesigner experiment. It was realizing what was beginning to happen around the work while I was building it.
Somewhere in the process I stopped thinking about TouchDesigner only as a place to make separate visual experiments and started seeing what it could add to the way I present the work.
Not replacing the website. Building a world around it.
Websites are still at the center of the studio, but I like the idea that the work does not always have to end at the browser window. Motion, image, sound and these more experimental systems can become another layer around the same project.
That is the part I want to keep exploring.
