Pressure Project – Stimulation

For my self-generating patch, I was primarily focused on learning new techniques and getting familiar with Touch Designer as a software. I wanted my project to be colorful and stimulating, but I am also unfamiliar with this program, so I was limited with my own techniques. 

For the five hour time constraint, I spent most of my time doing trial and error with this project. For the first couple of hours, I was trying to figure out what to even do. I was consistently making and then deleting nodes to figure out what I wanted from this project. Eventually, I moved on to outsourcing other people’s projects and tutorials in order to actually learn more about what I was doing. Because we only learned a shallow amount of Touch Designer in class, I had to rely heavily on other tutorials in order to properly figure out how to navigate through the software. Once I found a few adequate videos to follow along with, I used that as a starting point for my project. I spent the remainder of my time limit following along with tutorials on easy visuals and then subsequently made them my own. I added color and shape changes so that it wasn’t just a copy and paste version of the tutorial. From there, I also added some of my own visuals from techniques that I already knew and had the hand of. Finally, I put everything together and made sure I had multiple visual stimuli so that it wasn’t just one shape or color that was changing. 

The main choice throughout this project was choosing what to add and how to do it. I wanted more than just one or two things, so I tried to add a multitude of different nodes and objects that would catch the viewers attention. I didn’t want to add too much, though, in order to not overstimulate the viewer. 

Overall, this project was surprisingly difficult and I wish I had more time to learn more about the software and how to make things in it. I am disappointed with the lack of information I had going into this project and I felt as though there wasn’t enough time given to properly execute a project that I would be proud of.