The instrumentis the artwork.
Ten shows taken apart, ten instruments left running for anyone to play, and two mirrors that fold the room into itself until the work goes on forever with you standing in it.
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 our live work is improvised, not time-coded. Someone is playing the rig while the artist plays the room.
Each of the ten works is shown with the machinery that produced it, and where we can, the system is left running rather than played back.
Every station names the animators and designers who built the work.
A strange loop you can walk into
The studio is called Strangeloop. So the room should loop.
Three moves.
03 · The descent
You enter at the newest work and walk backwards through time, ending on video feedback on a CRT. Then out past the first screen.
The mirrors are the biggest ask here. Weight, fixing and cost sit with the gallery. Fallbacks: mirrored film on panel, or one mirror against a dark end wall.
Wood Street, second floor
A 61'-9" × 29'-5" hall. Low ceiling, a wall of windows, and a floor that reflects.
| 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 leave it on.
What it looks like
Built from the gallery's own photograph, so the architecture is the real room. The screens carry our actual show content.
Look development, not construction drawings.
Perimeter and center
Ten works around the edge, one new piece in the middle. Click any zone.
Ten stations, one machine
Works sit on the perimeter. The centre is left open for the piece that needs height.
Approximate scale from the Wood Street plan. Station positions are a proposal.
What one station is
Five parts, repeated ten times.
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. Nothing here is a loop.
Station types, drawn to spec
Sections at true scale. Figure is 5'-9". Dimensions are off the Wood Street plan.
A full-height image under a 9'-10" ceiling needs an ultra-short-throw lens, roughly a 0.5 throw ratio. Worth confirming before anything is bought.
Bay arithmetic
The window wall cannot carry work, so the usable perimeter is about 121 linear feet. Ten bays at 8'-0" leaves roughly 4'-6" between stations. The Engine at 10'-0" wide leaves about 9'-8" of walkway front and back.
Display media are mixed. CRTs carry the earliest work.
Works on the perimeter
Ten pieces. 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 tour masters are not in the working archive.
Collaborators, as already published
The names on our own site today. Not the full list, and the wall credits go deeper. 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 |
Looop and Laskfar Vortok appear on both Badu and Bonobo. Unc, credited on Flying Lotus, is the demoscene author whose work we have been porting for years.
The Engine
One new piece, built for this room
The perimeter stations are the ones you play. This is the one that plays you.
A live Notch system with no controls. Cameras read the room and the crowd drives it. A raymarched 3D fractal morphing between a Menger fold and a Mandelbulb, fractal noise eroding the solid, and thousands of particles riding the curl of that field.
Cameras. Nothing to touch. Presence, position and motion drive the particle and noise fields. No interface, no queue.
The inversion. Ten stations show a person at a desk driving the images. Then the largest screen makes the floor the input.
Nothing to break over six weeks. Scales from one visitor to forty. No audio conflict with the show 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 field. Running live, not a video. Drag to orbit.
Toggle any pass.
Two ways through the room
Every work is tagged twice, by pipeline stage and by system. Walk it by artist or 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 work reappears at several stages.
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.
Panel first, workshop second. RAF raised it and we agree.
Workshop · Tech25, Sat Dec 12
Tech25 is a strong fit. The teaching lab already runs Resolume, Adobe and Ableton on RTX machines.
| 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.
A demo on the big rig with no cap, then a capped hands-on session in the lab. Built on Resolume, since people can carry on with it afterwards, with custom plugins on top.
Licenses to chase for the workshop: Notch, Resolume, Maxon, Adobe, Derivative.
Book
Format still open. The exhibition generates the material either way. Capture to book standard during production and decide later.
What we need from the gallery
The gallery has offered to purchase what is needed. To spec it we need 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 ten works confirmed
- 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.