Welcome to the Underground Collective.

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Syphon Tripper is a creative collective art installation done in collaboration with projection artists, tech wizards, industrial designers, production designers, interactive designers, live music performers, and illustrative masterminds — all locally in Savannah, Georgia.

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I created this audio-reactive projection to symbolize the unfiltered raw aesthetic of a live performance. It had a projection of the crowd and our band slightly elevated so that you could see the band and crowd together. On top of that, I also introduced the concept of 3D mesh warping — a process that takes that video feed as a flat, 2D plane, and uses visual noise to calculate the partitions of the plane to skew, causing it to warp based on the decibels of audio in the input. I set the threshold to react to the lower frequencies, so that the drums and bass would be picked up — creating a visual rhythmic beat that the visuals would be in direct synchronization with the band’s music.

Syphon Tripper: Dionysus — The Pixelated Warper

Also, a big thank you to Seamus O’Conner for adjusting the projection during the performance, and tweaking the controllers to account for accurate decibel values as the night continued.

This was primarily a projection I made for the promotion of the backyard event, which was sponsoring “Ditch Witch” a senior capstone film created by my friend, Sophia Mogames. This backyard area featured a dark, painted telephone booth. I supplied a fog machine and I also used some laser projections to work alongside the fog machine, creating a multi-colored halo effect through the fog. Front and center, before entering is my projection to support this project, titled “The Swarm.” It’s named after the ParticlesGPU effect that makes up the core interactive elements.

Syphon Tripper: Dionysus — The Swarm (Ditch Witch)

The projection features a camera and ring light that people can walk in front of to display themselves on the wooden fence. This was technically two projections, as it was an outside event during sundown. Halfway through the sunset I changed it to the inverse effect to work with the lighting change.

This was a projection I made with Aarya Nagre, whom I have done the earlier Lego Projection Project with in the past. This was a rather simpler projection, focused on more of a direct output rather than an interactive experience. We wanted to use interactive tools to build the experience, however. We had some other collaborators who were able to send us some models for the experience as well, so I was able to then rig them, then put a simple zombie animation on them, before throwing the model into Unity. I ran an animation controller to loop while he was running forward, and fed the output feed of the Unity camera into TouchDesigner, where I applied the psychedelic feedback loop effect, and composited the video background on it.

Syphon Tripper: Dionysis — The Knight Falls

As a result, we were able to project it directly onto the wall. It was rather difficult to not have this particular projection overlap with others, as the area was absolutely filled with awesome projections.

Syphon Tripper: Circus — The Lego Projection

It was a rather quick turnaround time for the project — just a few days and a Papa John’s Pizza seemed to do the trick.

*Lego is not a sponsor of this project. Although, if they were… I wouldn’t mind.

I created and programmed a digital Lego projection alongside my collaborator, Aarya Nagre. Aarya was responsible for the Lego texture, and I was responsible for creating the feedback loop to work with the video effects, including the interactive gesture commands. This projection featured interactive elements such as a configured camera feed going through a digital obfuscation process. On the ground, we have taped a blue rectangle the viewers stood inside of. Their projection of themselves as Lego characters would then come to life in real time. A core feature I wanted to get working in this projection was implementing gesture controls. For this, I was in a unique case where I had my Mac Mini, to which I could access the SDK for gestural commands, and was able to apply them before the feed went through the obfuscation process.

The Final Product

I designed a series of projections to use with our typically street performace band ClusterFunk when performing live in front of a 100+ person audience.

For this series of projections, I programmed a realtime baking machine that allowed projection switching from a controller coded in python — all created in TouchDesigner.

Workbook Process

One of the challenges set for us, besides preparing our music equipment for the live show, was to create a projection to go with our performance. There was a desire to have a projection going alongside our music to contribute to the aesthetics of the event.

The Final Product

I was a part of designing the first interactive projection the event has ever had, alongside my collaborator Tucker Ziegler — using infrared to channel responses based on gestures done with your hands. This is one of my earlier interaction works, and this led me down a path of interactive installations, and from this point forward there was no turning around.