There is a particular feeling that comes with working in TouchDesigner. You open a project meaning to spend twenty minutes on something small, and somehow you are still there hours later, half lost in a tangle of nodes, chasing a result that may or may not arrive. Some days it clicks. Most days it does not. Lately that second kind of day has been more common, and it has started to feel less like a creative practice and more like getting sucked into a tunnel with no clear exit.
That feeling is worth naming, because it is not a sign that something is wrong with the work, or with the person doing it. Node based tools like TouchDesigner are less like writing and more like debugging a living system. The process is part technical and part intuitive, and the "mostly I don't" days are simply part of how that process works. Progress in tools like this rarely looks like a straight line. It looks like long stretches of nothing, followed by a small breakthrough.
The Piece: Video, Audio, and a Color Problem
With all of that as backdrop, here is the project that prompted these thoughts. It was made primarily from video footage that switches according to audio amplitude and rhythm, with portions of that footage displaced through itself, creating a kind of layered, shifting visual texture tied directly to sound.
Thank you for reading.
