Deathbed Fever Dream (2025)
An experimental visualisation of an original composition, exploring life, death, memory, love, connection, and what it means to be human.
The Concept
A collage of generative visuals and augmented real-life footage, created as a visualisation of my original composition Reminiscence (2021). The patchwork nature of this work was born of my desire to essentially show off every technique and system I had learned in TouchDesigner so far. I took a very exploratory approach to creating this work, beginning only with a rough storyboard and steadily experimenting my way to a finished products that I was satisfied with.
The fragmented, nostalgic narrative element of the work, combined with the vibrant, hallucination-like generative visuals ultimately inspired the choice of title.
The Process
Most of the generative visuals in this work have an audio-reactive element; that is, they have at least one parameter directly linked to a frequency band in the music track (low, medium, or high). This is particularly visible in visuals such as the pulsing red circles in the outro, which have their radius connected to the low frequency band of the song where the fading human heartbeat can be heard - thus making their movements resemble a beating heart.
I didn’t begin this project with a very clear plan of what I wanted the finished product to look like. Rather, I began by deciding what techniques I wanted to include in the work (e.g. feedback loops, text, abs.Time equations, etc) and which real-life videos to incorporate, then considering where each might fit nicely into the music. For the generative visuals, I also considered what type of visual might best represent the audio it was accompanying. I once again deferred to my synaesthesia in many of these decisions; for example, in constructing the quivering blue triangles in the opening, the bassline looked very dark blue to me and seemed to have a shimmering quality to it.
The real-life videos were taken from my personal camera roll, captured between 2017 and 2020. They are also the original videos that the audio samples used in Reminiscence were extracted from. This intimately tied the visuals together with its soundtrack. Most of these videos were plugged into feedback loops, altering their colour palettes and clarity and giving each one its own distinct dream-like quality, like a hazy memory.
The Tech
This work was created entirely in TouchDesigner, featuring original generative visuals, real-life videos from my personal camera roll, and my original soundtrack.
Feedback loops were used heavily in augmenting the imported real-life footage. I also set up an intricate network of timers controlling the entries and durations of each network, connected to keyboard inputs to reset the visuals upon each replay.
