Introduction
We live surrounded by systems that respond: a screen that reacts to touch, a light that comes on with movement, a sound that changes according to what we say. In interactive art and in stage installations, that capacity to respond ceases to be a technical function and becomes creative material. The question that shapes this workshop is not “what technology do we use?”, but “what relationship do we want to build between the work and the person who inhabits it?”. A sensor, a rule of interaction and a visual output are the three minimum elements of any reactive installation; to understand that triad —input, process, output— is to understand the vocabulary in which a large part of the contemporary stage is written today. You do not need to be a programmer to master that vocabulary: what you need, above all, is curiosity and a willingness to try things out.
Over the next four hours we are going to move from reflection to action with a tool that is, precisely, designed for creators rather than engineers: TouchDesigner. We will work with the webcam and microphone of our own computers as sensors, and we will build two working prototypes —a visual that responds to sound and another that responds to light and movement— which you will be able to modify, break and put back together. The goal is not that you leave knowing how to programme, but that you leave with a clear intuition of how a piece of data from the real world is connected to an image in real time, and with the seed of a project that you can go on exploring at home with the free version of the software. At the end we will share the results and discuss how we would take each prototype onto a stage, into an exhibition room or into a live performance.
