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Author: Valeria Kvon
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Final Outcome. Methods of iterating
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Written response. Methods of iterating
Week 1. Draft 1
Opposite to the spectacle there is an idea of mundane — something, that usually goes unnoticed and overlooked in the flow of life. While TouchDesigner heavily prioritizes wide crowd in a real-time setting like shows/concerts/performances which is evident from its description by Derivative:
TouchDesigner is a visual development platform that equips you with the tools you need to create stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences.
It becomes clear that the TD serves as a amplifier or a bridge between the source of the ‘spectacle’ and its’ audience. According to McLuhan media theory (’Media is the Message’) we live in the age that direct people’s minds inwards, shifting the attention from collective thinking and knowledge, towards encouraging personal opinions and perspectives. So, similarly, I want to walk away from the collestivism in consumption of ‘spectacle’, the initially created purpose and context of TouchDesigner, and reimagine this tool as a way to turn back technology from maximalism and ground it in a more simple and whimsical use. Based on the aesthetics that derive from the use of TouchDesigner it feels like there is a specific aesthetic that emerges from all these node manipulations, so I’m calling back it to the mundanity and the opportunity for the tool to participate in small life interactions.
Week 2. Draft 2
Opposite to spectacle is the mundane — the small, repetitive, almost invisible texture of everyday life that usually goes unnoticed in the flow of routines. TouchDesigner, however, is commonly positioned as a tool for amplification: it is built to make things bigger, brighter, louder, and more collectively consumable in real time. Derivative describes it as:
TouchDesigner is a visual development platform that equips you with the tools you need to create stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences.
In this framing, TouchDesigner becomes a bridge between a “source of spectacle” and its audience — an infrastructure for attention. But I want to work against that default direction. McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message” helps me see TouchDesigner not as a neutral container for content, but as a medium that already carries cultural expectations: speed, spectacle, responsiveness, scale, performance. If the tool’s cultural message tends toward maximalism, my enquiry becomes: what happens when I deliberately misuse this medium for something quiet, partial, and small? How does technology look like when it becomes intimate and private?
Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s Adhocism (the case for improvisation and hybrid making) offers a lens to re-read my process. Adhocism values provisional solutions, repurposing, and making-with-what-is-available rather than designing toward a single polished “ideal.” This feels strangely aligned with node-based working: TouchDesigner’s logic is literally connective tissue — patching, rerouting, testing, breaking, recombining. The “look” that emerges from these manipulations is not only visual; it is procedural. A TouchDesigner patch often records its own thinking: a visible chain of decisions, quick fixes, and discoveries.
Through Adhocism, I can reframe my project as an attempt to turn TouchDesigner from a spectacle machine into a tool for everyday noticing. Instead of using realtime to impress a crowd, I want to use realtime to acknowledge micro-interactions — tiny gestures, idle rhythms, near-unremarkable changes. That shift also connects to practitioners like Chia Amisola or Spencer Chang, who intentionally use technology in non-efficient ways: not to optimise outcomes, but to create space for curiosity, friction, and gentle play. Their approach gives me permission to treat TouchDesigner less like production software and more like a sketchbook for living systems.
The tension I need to hold is this: how do I “show” the mundane without turning it into spectacle? If I amplify an ordinary moment too much, it becomes performance again. So the next step in my enquiry is to design constraints that protect mundanity: slower feedback, quieter visuals, smaller scale, imperfect responsiveness, and an aesthetic that feels like a side-note rather than a headline. In tutorial, I want to discuss whether adhoc, improvised patch-making can become not only my method, but also the ethical stance of the work — a way of keeping technology grounded in modest, intimate life.
Week 3. Draft 3
Opposite to spectacle is the mundane. It is the small, repetitive texture of everyday life that usually slips past attention. But when we talk about the “possibilities” of technology, we often talk in the language of spectacle. Speed, quality, seamlessness, connectivity. It can feel almost religious, like technology is the answer to everything no matter what the real problem is. With that attitude comes a kind of fetishisation. We start believing digital tools work magically, which hides labour, social inequality, and environmental cost. And the strange part is that the most powerful technologies do not look powerful. They become invisible because they blend into normal life.
This is what people describe as ambient or ubiquitous computing. Mark Weiser wrote that the most profound technologies “disappear,” weaving into everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. I keep thinking about that disappearance not as a neutral design goal, but as a shift in power. When something feels seamless, we stop noticing it, and when we stop noticing it, we stop questioning it. That logic carries into creative software too. Ease becomes a workflow, then a workflow becomes a habit, and eventually a habit becomes a limit. Without meaning to, we adjust our thinking to the tool. TouchDesigner enters my project as a kind of contradiction inside this story. On one hand, it is framed as an engine of amplification, built for “stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences.” It assumes spectacle. It assumes scale. It assumes an audience. But on the other hand, it refuses to fully disappear. It exposes its structure. You can see the work. You can see the logic. You can see the messy middle. That is why it becomes a useful place to test a different relationship with technology.
So instead of asking “how do I make TouchDesigner mundane” as a visual outcome, I started asking a different question. How can a tool that is built for spectacle be used to build intimacy. Not a totalising experience, but small exchanges you can actually inhabit. If the medium carries its own message(Marshall McLuhan), then using it against its default is already a form of writing back. TouchDesigner’s default might be stage and performance, but I want to treat it like a workbench. Something close-up and domestic.
This is where adhocism starts to feel like a method I can work with. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation describes improvisation as a design sensibility. Use what is at hand. Make hybrids. Let provisional structures be part of the process, not a mistake. When I look at node-based work through this lens, the patch stops being a pipeline toward a polished showpiece. It becomes an adhoc structure where reroutes, quick tests, and small repairs slowly form a working ecology. The network becomes a record of thought, continious work-in-progress.
That matters because it changes how I think about “control.” It is not about mastering the tool in a heroic way. It is about refusing the feeling that the tool is sealed and untouchable. Audre Lorde’s line about the master’s tools is a warning about uncritical use. If I treat technology as authoritative and inevitable, I reproduce its defaults. But if I treat it as material I can re-route, then the tool becomes negotiable. And negotiation is closer to intimacy than efficiency is.Once intimacy becomes the aim, I need language for what kind of intimacy I mean. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction shifts the story away from heroic tools and toward holding tools. Not the spear, the vessel. I am not trying to build a perfect system that holds everything. I want something that holds fragments. Small signals, half-noticed gestures, quiet loops that do not demand high performance.
This is also why “home-cooked” and “handmade” computing becomes practical for my project, not just poetic. Spencer Chang writes about tools that are personal and emotionally resonant, shaped to everyday specificity rather than universal efficiency. Chia Amisola also writes from conditions of limitation and intermittency, where constraints can create attentiveness instead of lack. Reading them makes me more confident that “less” can be a deliberate design choice, not a failure.
Through my iterations in TouchDesigner, I explored it from a more intimate side. I focused on building a dialogue between the computer and the user in a gentle, caring manner, which is not naturally inherent to mainstream technology. By testing pop-ups, language, and the computer’s responses, I developed the interaction into something more personal and private. Over time, my enquiry narrowed into the tension between the cursor as human input and the pop-up as the system’s interruption, and I used that tension as the main site for designing a softer, more inhabitable exchange.
Rendered Version Draft 3
For the rendered version, I carried forward the idea of the pop-up as “computer language.” I wanted to evoke a controlled sense of chaos, where words appear unpredictably, almost like a glitch or a brief emotional outburst from the system.
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