From Nothing (working title) is a public-facing, interactive work of abstract art. Built in TouchDesigner and integrated with Scope via Andrew Sun’s ScopeTD plugin, the system operates as a continuous visual feedback loop. A dense, ever-evolving particle simulation generated in TouchDesigner is streamed to Scope (via Spout/ScopeTD), where it is rendered into an animation. That animation is then sent back into TouchDesigner (via Spout/Scope) and composited with the original particle system. The result is a recursive visual effect in which the particles appear to generate—or draw into existence—the very imagery that returns to them.

I originally surrendered to the necessity of using remote inference begrudgingly, because I assumed that the latency issues would be ruinous. Instead, it enabled me to be greedy about allocation of GPU resources to TouchDesigner and offload all of the inference required by Scope to a remote server.

Next steps will be to build a LoRA for precise control over the imagery that Scope generates. (Diego has generously offered to provide us with a tutorial of LoRA creation—watch the Discord for news about that.)

Some ideas for the look and feel are below.