Nuit Live: Historical Archive was part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2020, a fully online, 12-hour all-night live-streaming event on YouTube. The Historical Archive was an automated visualization of 13 years of Nuit Blanche history in Toronto, animating photos from past exhibitions and installations.

Reflecting the public shift from in-person to remote engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, the theme of the festival was “online.” The animated transitions between archived images referenced retro computer interfaces and aesthetics, such as the frame lag of Windows XP, the swipe gallery of classic Mac desktops, 3D transformations, etc.

The data-driven visualization was created using TouchDesigner. A script was written within TouchDesigner’s Python to pattern-match the name, title, and date from a data table to similarly named images on a hard drive. The archive’s images could be shuffled and displayed according to their metadata, such as year, artist, display date, or location. Animation components dynamically adjusted to the image size and number of available photos. The images were first cached before being queued for display, ensuring smooth playback without frame drops.

The automated archival visualization ran in real-time but was exported as video. Spanning approximately 2 hours and consisting of 2 TB of images, the historical archive played between online events during Nuit Blanche 2020, from 7 pm on October 3 to 7 am on October 4, 2020. The project was realized in collaboration with the Public Visualization Studio.

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