The instrumentis the artwork.
A retrospective of Strangeloop Studios at Wood Street Galleries. Eight shows taken apart, the systems that made them left running, and one new machine in the middle of the room that the public gets to drive.
What the show is about
A live show is not a video. It is a system built to respond in the moment. This exhibition takes ten of those systems apart.
About three quarters of what Strangeloop does live is improvised, not time-coded. The operator is playing the rig while the artist plays the room. What ends up on the screen is the output of an instrument, and the instrument is the thing worth showing.
So this is not a showreel on a wall. Each of the ten works is presented with the machinery that produced it: the patch, the node graph, the simulation, the reference. Where we can, the system is left running, so the piece on the wall is being generated rather than played back.
It is also a show about people. Every station names the animators and designers who built the work. That is the part of this industry nobody ever sees.
Wood Street, second floor
A 61'-9" × 29'-5" hall with a low ceiling, a wall of windows, and a floor that reflects everything you put on it. The room's constraints set the design.
| MEASURE | VALUE | WHAT IT MEANS FOR US |
|---|---|---|
| Main hall | 61'-9" × 29'-5" · ~1,817 sq ft | Comfortable for eight stations plus a center piece and real circulation. |
| Ceiling | 9'-10", rising to 12'-7" at a central ridge | Low. Long projector throws are out. Short-throw and floor-standing surfaces win. The ridge is the only real height in the room. |
| North wall | Continuous windows, 78" bays | Not projectable, and it leaks daylight. Treated as the ambient edge instead of fought. |
| Entry | Elevator → 15'-7" dogleg → alcove | A natural compression corridor before the room opens. Built into the design. |
| Floor | Dark polished concrete | Reflective. Emissive pieces double for free. |
| Ceiling grid | Existing white truss / pipe with track | Rig points already exist. Load rating still to confirm. |
| Egress | Two stairwell exits, east and west | Must stay clear. Circulation loops around the center piece. |
The FLOW installation on the building exterior cannot be removed, only switched off. We keep it on. Seen from inside it reads as a colored grid across the whole window wall, and it costs us nothing.
What it looks like
Visualizations built from the gallery's own photograph, so the architecture in every frame is the real room: the low beamed ceiling, the pipe run, the window wall, the floor that reflects. The screens carry our actual show content.
These are look development, not construction drawings. Screen counts and exact placements come from the plan in the next section.
Perimeter and center
Ten works around the edge. One new machine in the middle, under the high ridge. Click any zone.
Ten stations, one machine
Works sit on the perimeter so the low ceiling works in our favour: short-throw projection and floor-standing surfaces, no long overhead throws. The center is left open for the one piece that needs height.
Diagram is to approximate scale from the Wood Street second floor plan. Station positions are a proposal, not a survey.
What one station is
Five parts, repeated ten times. The control surface is the one that changes what this show is.
Primary surface
Projection, panel, LED or CRT, chosen per work.
Control surface
Real faders and encoders. Every station is playable.
Process layer
Source assets, node graph, previs, or the live patch.
Credit panel
The animators and designers who built it, named.
Systems tag
Which technique drives the piece.
Every screen has a control surface. Ten instruments, each the class of rig that ran that artist's show, opened up and handed to the public. A visitor walks the room playing ten different systems. Nothing here is a loop.
Station types, drawn to spec
Sections through the hall at true scale against the 9'-10" wall and the 12'-7" ridge. Figure is 5'-9". Every dimension is measured off the Wood Street plan.
The ceiling sets the projector spec. A full-height image under a 9'-10" ceiling needs an ultra-short-throw lens, roughly a 0.5 throw ratio, not a standard short-throw. Worth confirming with the gallery before anything is bought.
Bay arithmetic
The window wall cannot carry work, so the usable perimeter is the south, east and west walls: about 121 linear feet. Ten bays at 8'-0" uses 80 feet and leaves roughly 4'-6" between stations for circulation and both exits. The Engine at 10'-0" wide sits inside the 12'-7" ridge and still leaves about 9'-8" of walkway front and back.
Display media are deliberately mixed. CRTs carry the earliest work, so the display technology becomes part of the chronology.
Works on the perimeter
Ten pieces, which is the number RAF landed on too. Chosen to span years, systems and display type. Draft picks for discussion, not a locked list.
Flying Lotus
The longest-running collaboration and the through-line of the studio. The deepest process layer in the room.
Tokimonsta
Featured artist for the program, with the possibility of her taking part in the panel.
The Weeknd
The largest-scale production in the set, and the 3D LED case study.
BLACKPINK
Coachella. The largest audience of anything in the room, and a very different design brief to the rest.
Bonobo
Drumsheds, Royal Albert Hall, DGTL. Content built for a non-rectangular screen, which makes it the mapping case study.
Erykah Badu
The Unfollow Me Tour. The last tour show we built for her: upstage plus SL and SR screens on one pixel map.
Children of the Void
The studio's own authored work rather than client work. Worldbuilding and the AI pipeline.
Polia / Blastema
Original work and the internal projects that never faced an artist but fed everything that did.
Where it starts
Early studio and personal work. Video feedback, practical effects, strange loops.
Realtime now
The current Notch and Unreal systems. Sets up the machine in the middle of the room.
Three of these need assets sourced. Bonobo, BLACKPINK and the Badu Unfollow Me tour masters are not in the working archive. They need pulling from backup or re-requesting from the productions, along with the Badu pixel map.
Collaborators, as already published
These are the names on our own site today, so they are safe to show. They are not the full list: the site records collaborators, not everyone who worked a shot. The wall credits go deeper than this, and every addition gets confirmed before it is printed.
| WORK | PERIOD | COLLABORATORS |
|---|---|---|
| Flying Lotus | 2010–present | Steve Ellison · Timeboy · 3D Live | Axo. Content: Scott Pagano, Beeple, Unc, David Firth and others |
| Erykah Badu | 2012–2023 | Vince Fraser · Looop · Nic Juister · Steve Teeps · Vince McKelvie · Laskfar Vortok · Marcus Jessup · Lit Creative |
| The Weeknd | 2018 | Es Devlin · Leroy Bennett |
| BLACKPINK | 2023 | Cory Fitzgerald · Marvin Brown · Kiel Tutin |
| Bonobo | 2017–2019 | Autry Fulbright · Looop · Laskfar Vortok · Nick Maresh · Amanda Hamilton |
| Tokimonsta | 2015–present | Alec Maassen · 2+2 Mgmt |
| Polia & Blastema | 2022 | Directed by E. Elias Merhige. Nina McNeely · Jasmine Albuquerque · Micaela Tobin |
| Kendrick Lamar | 2013–2018 | The Little Homies · Cory Fitzgerald · Ian Simon |
Two names recur across the list. Looop and Laskfar Vortok appear on both Badu and Bonobo, and Unc, credited on Flying Lotus, is the demoscene author whose work the studio has been porting for years. Those threads are the exhibition.
The Engine
One new piece, built for this room
The perimeter stations are the ones you play with your hands. This is the one that plays you.
A live Notch system with no controls at all. Cameras read the room and the crowd drives it. It runs the techniques that recur across every work on the perimeter: a raymarched 3D fractal morphing between a Menger fold and a Mandelbulb, fractal noise eroding the solid, and thousands of particles advected through the curl of that field, at the largest scale in the room.
Cameras. Nothing to touch. Cameras watch the room. Presence, position and motion drive the particle and noise fields directly. No interface, no instruction, no queue.
The inversion. Ten stations teach you these images are driven by a person at a desk. Then the largest screen turns the whole floor into the input.
Nothing to break under six weeks of public handling. Scales from one visitor to forty. Avoids the audio conflict with the sound exhibition upstairs.
Open: camera count and placement, whether tracking is depth or plain RGB, and how the piece behaves in an empty room at 10am.
Try it
A raymarched 3D fractal, a domain-warped fBm noise field, and 12,000 particles riding the curl of that same field. Running live in your browser, not a video. Drag the frame to orbit it. Every station in the room works this way: take the frame apart, step how it was built, read the process note, then drive the system.
Toggle any pass. This is the same separation an operator works in, not a rendered explainer.
Two ways through the room
Every work is tagged twice: by the pipeline stage it best illustrates, and by the systems that drive it. Walk it by artist, or walk it by technique.
By pipeline stage
Idea / Theory
Concept and the conversation with the artist.
Reference & Worldbuild
Moodboard and look target. The world being built.
Asset Generation
3D, simulation, AI.
Comp & Look-dev
Where the look gets set.
Realtime / Mapping
Notch, Resolume, Unreal. Mapping to the venue.
Live Performance
The show. Mostly improvised.
A single work reappears at several stages. That recurrence is the argument.
By system
Unreal
Realtime environments and the large-format LED work.
Notch
The live instrument. What an operator actually plays.
Practical
Camera, feedback, physical effects. Where the studio started.
Particles
Simulation as the source of motion rather than keyframes.
Fractals
Recursion and self-similarity. The studio's name is not decorative.
Noise
The substrate under nearly everything on these walls.
Panel, workshop, book
Panel
Ian and David, moderated by Nica from CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, with possible Tokimonsta participation. Same thesis as the exhibition: how a show actually gets built, and why the improvisation is the point.
Recommendation: panel first, workshop second. RAF raised this and we agree. The panel sets the question the workshop then answers.
Workshop · Tech25, Sat Dec 12
Tech25 is a strong fit. Their teaching lab already runs Resolume, Adobe and Ableton on RTX machines, and the training theater has a full rig for the demo half.
| RESOURCE | WHAT THEY HAVE |
|---|---|
| Teaching lab | 8 stations · Lenovo Legion T5, RTX 3060, 16GB, Win 11 · Resolume, Adobe CC, Ableton Live 12 Intro · MPK Mini, Volt 2, headphones |
| Instructor station | Mac Mini M2, 70" display, monitors |
| Training theater | 67' × 70', 13' ceiling · 150" screen, Sony VPL-CWZ10 · RCF PA, Onyx lighting, hazer · 24' × 12' stage |
| Also available | 5 Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 (RTX), 8 MacBook Air M3, 12 older MacBook Air, 34 iPads |
Eight lab stations caps hands-on at eight to sixteen people. Above that it is a demo, not a workshop. That number drives the whole format.
Proposed shape: a demo on the big rig in the training theater with no cap, then a capped hands-on session in the lab. Built on Resolume, since it is affordable enough that people can carry on afterwards, and showing custom plugins on top of it. Pittsburgh is a DIY city, so the useful move is showing what budget and access make possible in a form people can rebuild with what they have.
Licenses to chase for the workshop: Notch, Resolume, Maxon, Adobe, Derivative.
Book
Format still open. The exhibition generates the material either way: eight case studies, the process assets, the credited team, the systems essay. A book is the natural home for the process layer a gallery wall cannot hold. Capture everything to book standard during production and decide later. It should not gate the show.
What we need from the gallery
The gallery has offered to follow our lead and purchase what is needed. To spec that, we need answers to these.
Six weeks unattended is a design constraint, not an afterthought. Every station has to boot itself, run all day and shut down without a technician in the building.
Open decisions
OURS
- Final eight works, and whether W4 stays a fifth artist
- The Engine: camera count, placement, empty-room behaviour
- Control surface hardware, ten of them, spec and durability
- Panel before workshop (recommended)
- Confirm Dec 11–13 against studio bookings
- Animator and credit list, confirmed name by name
- Budget position: what we absorb, what is funded
THEIRS
- Tokimonsta, hard yes or no
- Gallery tech answers, via Davine
- Workshop cap and RA ticketing
- Travel and accommodation dates
- Image assets for flyers, poster and social
Timeline
Budget is not costed here. It needs the gallery's gear answers first, and no number goes across until David and Ian set it.