Nuit Live , Historical Archive, 2020
Live-Stream Video

In March 2020, as the pandemic reached its peak, the city of Toronto shifted the annual Nuit Blanche all-night art festival online. I was approached by the Public Visualization Studio to create an automated script that animated an archive of past exhibitions and installations from Nuit Blanche events. The script was created by first organizing data tables containing year, artist, display date, and location, the script would use these tables to pull images from a hard drive in a desired sequence for example by year, location or alphabetically. The theme of this year's festival was “online” or desktop-focused referencing the public shift from in-person to remote work. The animated transitions between images were related to a desktop theme, for example, the frame lag from Windows XP, the swipe gallery from Mac, and other various 3D transformations. I programmed the animations using TouchDesigner, and a script was written within TouchDesigner’s Python node to pattern-match the name, title and date, from the data table to similarly named images on a hard drive. The images were then displayed with each image cached before they were cued so that they loaded quickly and smoothly. The animations ran in real-time but were exported as video and played during the event. The historical archive runtime spanned around 2 hours and contained about 2 TB of images, that played between each online event.

Role: Touchdesigner Developer
Organization: Public Visualization Studio
Technology: Touchdesigner, Python