Cursive is a real-time audiovisual performance piece I built in TouchDesigner, created as a portfolio project for The Interactive & Immersive HQ TouchDesigner Bootcamp. Using DMX lights, I built a visual show for the song "Cursive" by Mandy, Indiana, using the motion, direction, and color of the lights to mirror and subvert the track's chaotic ferocity.

"Cursive" doesn't resolve, it escalates, and I took that energy as my foundation: a real-time audiovisual experience built around the tension between chaos and control, where systems are pushed to their breaking point but never fully collapse.

My emotional target was that disorienting, electric in-between, tense and euphoric at once. Overstimulation as transcendence. Rather than anchoring the audience to a screen, I built the experience entirely around a 9x9 grid of moving lights, pulling eyes around the room and keeping the space alive and unpredictable.

No video content, no single focal point, just light in motion reacting to sound.

I chose to open with the track's frenetic, percolating percussion that never lets up, expanding into a noisy, poppy dance track that's equal parts relentless and infectious. I picked "Cursive" because its unpredictability maps perfectly onto the chaos vs. control concept, giving my lighting system something to chase, react to, and occasionally be surprised by.

I kept the color palette predominantly white, using light as a neutral, high-contrast base. I reserved warm and cold color pops for key moments in the track, punctuating builds, drops, and shifts in energy, so that when color hits, it hits hard.

Creative Brief

Technical Documentation