Shadow Engine
Live Visual Instrument 2022 - now, work in progress
This post is going to document my work on a new instrument which is designed to be played in real time to produce visuals for electronic music gigs. Here are my first attempts to perform with it in October of last year.
Intro
I like watching shadows and always thought that they are a beautiful material for live performances. During pandemic I was reading This Isn't Happening, a book about Radiohead's "Kid A" album, which got me started on digging up obscure albums from 2000s that featured in Radiohead's webcasts of the time. Some album artworks really aligned with my tastes. There was this love or fascination with light, its properties, how it reacts with film, the chemical reaction, but also the feeling light produces in the night, when you are alone maybe. So really from those images the shadow engine started.
Instrument Development
Scene
Shadow Engine is written in TouchDesigner. It renders visuals from one 3D scene which has lights, obstacles that cast shadows onto a wall and a camera that films the wall. When playing, I can control the movement of lights with different wave types, change their parameters and add and remove obstacles as I wish. Below are some panels of the interface:
Presets
To make shadow patterns the performer can control up to 4 lights and up to 6 obstacles. At this stage I am exposing quite some parameters for each light and obstacle. This allows for greater creative freedom in visual composition but of course has a downside of being slow as a performance instrument. For the moment I am solving it with a preset system. As I compose before a show, I am saving good compositions as presets that I can alter and build up on during the performance.
As you see in the video, presets are managed by a Python extension. It has methods to save and recall settings for each light and obstacle, write them as a file on disk, remove presets with certain names etc. The system is still very rough but it will be polished as I practice playing with it.
