Study_1

This real-time piece, created in TouchDesigner, is an illustration for one of the lectures by A. Smulyanskiy given during his seminar Lacan-Likbez (Season 5, Lecture 4 – The Act of Utterance (Énonciation) as Enjoyment of Form). To get the irony of this piece, the viewer is invited to listen to the lecture carefully while observing the audio-reactive—or, better said, speech-reactive—changing shapes.

These forms are deliberately reminiscent of the famous "Rorschach test", traditionally meant to "reveal something about the observer's unconscious mind through ambiguous forms". Around the head silhouette, there is also an audio-reactive cloud of "signifiers" with a constantly changing random number. In the lecture, we follow the thought that the subject continues to desperately cling to the idea of the “signified,” using it to defend the right to “meaning.” Because of this, everyone continues to talk about the “content of what was said” precisely where it would be more appropriate to discuss the signifier, which undergoes a “doubling” procedure.

Jouissance "wins."

Speech-reactive

For an alternative version of this project, there’s an option to render the lecture transcript alongside the lecture itself, adjusting its position with the animation timeline

The TouchDesigner patch consists of six main parts:

  • Audio Analysis: Provides audio-reactivity for shape morphing, grid transformations, and text cloud scaling and positioning.

  • Shape and Instancing Work: Manages the manipulation and instancing of shapes.

  • Rendering Network: Handles the rendering of all visual elements.

  • Text Cloud Component: Controls the display and behavior of the text cloud.

  • Dots Component: Manages the configuration and behavior of dots in the visuals.

  • Post Effects: Applies final visual effects to the output.

Full lecture: