Watch - InCognite

WKS is a big part of my roots in the local underground party scene, and in the last years InCognite has become their go-to visuals provider. Every year they do a nice summer party near Antwerp. Always heartwarming to be told to 'just do my thing'. Shoutout to Samuel for manning the outdoor stage.

Once again supporting Echoes From The Future deco crew with custom visuals for their mythical stage. In this clip Corpo Mal are finishing their epic set while I offer them some magic mushrooms in the ancient portal.

The generative AI landscape has evolved so much in just a few years. Trough online services powered by tech and social media giants it has become super easy to create realistic images and video clips for those who are willing to pay subscriptions or hand over their data. But art should not be that easy. It needs struggle, exploration, uniqueness.Taking the journey to get things working on my own computer, with nothing but a consumer-grade GPU, a bunch of huggingface downloads and a lot of patience, now THAT feels much more rewarding, even when the results are superficially inferior.I have been cautiously following this technology since 2015, the trippy dog-face days of Google Deep Dream, when this truly still felt like obscure magic. Then in 2021 Dall-E set a new bar in realism, even though by today's standards it was mostly making rough sketches, but it preserved that surreal, dream-like quality. The machine was still dreaming, hallucinating. That same year, Disco Diffusion became available trough Google Collab and gave us the power to really dig into detailed settings and start automating things. And by the next year, the second revolution came along, and the local GPU was heating up running Stable Diffusion in Automatic1111. And it was glorious!To this date, I am still actively using SD1.5 for creative image generation, the amazing StreamDiffusionTD component for Touchdesigner, custom content for video mapping shapes... And it has been going for ages relative to the speed of AI development.Meanwhile, the AI landscape has rushed past me. Too many local inference tools to even memorize, catalogs full of AI models, LLM's married to Diffusers and ComfyUI to rule them all. So since this year I have been exploring new frontiers while trying to stay true to the roots. The intermediate result is this video, made using old Dall-E 1 images, outpainted with Stable Diffusion 1.5, re-imagined with Flux 2 Klein 9B, animated with WAN2.2, interpolated with RIFE 4.6 and upscaled with RealESRGan. Finally, using the good old Premiere to put it to a soundtrack made with Suno.

Experiment with a feedback network atop a varying grid of semi-hexagons.3 colors compete for survival.

Having such an intentional stage design provides excellent inspiration for a matching visual experience. After last year's edition where The main focus was the big portal and using AI-generated content to drive the visuals, this time the portal took more of a back seat and the stage was expanded with 2 pyramids and an epic Aztec centerpiece featuring 4 dragon heads.Development time was in short supply but thanks to the flexibility of my generative VJ system and some mapping assistance from Resolume Arena, the setup was ready in time and continuously improving all night!Stage design: Echoes From The Future crew (https://www.instagram.com/echoesfromthefuture.belgium/)String art: L'Altro Andrea (https://www.instagram.com/l.altro.andrea/)Lasers:

In April of 2023 I created this immersive pong game for Bring Your Own Beamer in Antwerp. A Motion Leap sensor tracked the player's hand to control 2 paddles at the same time. While a simple game by itself, splitting one's attention between the 2 independent surfaces proved to be quite a challenge!The background for each level featured a space-themed 3D scene.As usual, everything was made in TouchDesigner.

2 interactive artworks were running for the duration of the festival @SpaceSafari 2024 in Massembre, Belgium. One side was a Kinect installation where people had a space to dance and see a real-time animated point cloud of themselves with various audio reactive effects.The other side was a soft-touch experience with responsive visuals on a stretch fabric display.

Generative visuals, virtually mapped onto a 3D pyramid, projected onto a 2.5D pyramid-shaped stage decoration.

Short snippet from the live visual performance on the dome at Slagkracht Festival in Beringen, organized by Club 9

Enjoy this short peek into what InCognite can contribute to your projects.AV software prototyping, interactive installations and public displays, visual shows for musical performances and more!For contact and more info go to https://www.incognite.be

Made with TouchDesigner.The sound is an audio resampling of the top row of pixels with some reverb.Watch in 1080p60 for best effect.

Audio-visual generation in Touchdesigner, exploring noise.

I tried to grow ice crystals but was growing islands instead.Growing shapes in TouchDesigner with rule-based pixel feedback while animating the rule parameters. The colors and cloud reflection are aplied as an effect after generating a 16-bit grayscale image.The ambient audio is generated in VCV Rack.

InCognite showreel 2022.Some highlights of my work from the past 2 years.Enjoy with sound on

An atmospheric tutorial to get started with Kantare, my latest Touchdesigner project and one I decided to share with the community. It's essentially a wrapper application for Kantan Mapper, where multiple mappers can be created, managed and 'played back' with smooth fades, audio and OSC cues, making it a very rudimentary show control system. Mappings can be exported as tox files as well as UV (.exr), texture and b/w mask images.Everything is stored in a 'Kollection', which can also be exported and imported. Textures are also managed with drag and drop support, and editable trough the classic TouchDesigner network editor.The source file can be downloaded here: https://github.com/catronomix/SharedToxTo find out more about Kantan Mapper: https://docs.derivative.ca/Palette:kantanMapper00:00 - Setting up a Kollection00:22 - Working with the editor01:12 - Editing textures04:20 - 15 minutes of messing around18:12 - Playback mode

Based on 3 lidar scans from my phone, rendering and post effects in Touchdesigner and drone sounds from VCV Rack.

$For this event, a 3D model of the stage was created and rendered in realtime with generative textures and 3D scenes. As an experiment, an extra laptop was set up where anyone could play Marble Marcher (3D fractal navigation game) or paint on a template of the stage with a liquid simulation.<br /><br />Aside from the video game, all elements of this show were custom built in TouchDesigner. <br /><br />Video and audio taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIgQbnxS-gQ with consent.$

Catro Nomix