Wall Of Sound
Live performance
With Mickaël Pilon, Axel Gervais, Tristan Roy, and Gabriel Carpentier
Context
Wall Of Sound reinvents graffiti by fusing live artistic performance with real-time digital art. A graffiti artist creates a living work on screen, instantly transformed by the interventions of a drummer playing a MIDI drum kit - music and gesture become tools for visual creation. The style evolves along a narrative arc, moving from hip-hop toward techno. The project was also adapted into an interactive experience for the open house of UQAM's Immersive and Interactive Experience Creation program (see video number 3).
Role
I led the visual design, art direction, project management, integration, interaction design, and stage management.
Challenge
The setup relied on several distinct capture systems. The spray can was fitted with an ESP32, a button, and an infrared sensor linked to VYV's Photon system, which maps the space in 3D using its own sensors and calculates the can's exact position before sending the data to TouchDesigner to recreate a faithful reproduction of a real spray can. In parallel, a Kinect captured the drummer, hidden behind a curtain, to display them on screen with effects, while their MIDI drum kit sent data directly to affect the visuals. Getting these two data streams to talk to TouchDesigner and Ableton, in a live-performance context where nothing can be replayed if a system fails, was the project's real challenge.