KiddieScript
Mapping artwork
With Auréline Goubert, Tristan Roy, Antoine Parenteaux-Sales, and Gabriel Carpentier
Context
KiddieScript is a mapping artwork presented as part of MappMTL, for the Minute Map, and projected onto a large wall of the Van Horne skatepark. It explores the crossover between artistic visions and the technical tools artists use to carry them. It blends an organic aesthetic born in TouchDesigner, stop-motion animation, and an electronic aesthetic, all tied together by a soundtrack.
Role
I took care of the TouchDesigner visuals: a Python space colonization script, a physarum simulation, and liquid shading in GLSL. I made them react to the sound and follow the narrative arc, on top of handling the mapping itself.
Challenge
The biggest challenge was diving into GLSL, a language I barely knew, with a very short deadline. The mapping required a very high resolution, and I crashed TouchDesigner many times, often with the message "The Vulkan Device has returned a fatal error code". The causes varied, so each time I looked for ways to optimize so that the simulations and the shader could hold up at that resolution. I could have taken an easier path, but I chose to keep pushing until I got the result I had imagined.