The audio-reactive visual piece is designed for the London Creative Industries Exhibition at the Post Bar, London. It blends visual elements that evoke London’s cultural texture, pub heritage, urban art, and psychedelic abstraction.
The work draws on psychedelia—an art tradition that peaked during the late 1960s counterculture, which rejected rigid structures and embraced sensory exploration, surreal distortions, and vibrant color. Psychedelic art is about liberating the perceptual experience, pushing the borders between reality, memory, dream, and heightened awareness.
At the same time, the work is rooted in London—its architecture, social spaces (pubs), transport systems, and street culture. I combine motifs like stained/glass windows, pub carpets, London underground signage, graffiti tunnels, and urban flânerie (the act of observing city life) with psychedelic distortion to represent how London is both deeply historic and continuously evolving, buzzing with subcultures and diverse voices.
Built in TouchDesigner as a real-time audio-reactive system. Sound was captured via Audio Device In CHOP, then analyzed to extract low/mid/high frequency bands and percussive onsets (kicks/snares). Those values were mapped to parameters across the visual network to create direct, dynamic relationships between the music and imagery.
The system cycles through five distinct visual sets, each tied to a different cultural or architectural reference point in London. Together, they weave heritage, subculture, and counterculture into a layered, immersive experience.
This set draws from the amber glow of pub stained glass windows—symbols of warmth, safety, and community. Their frosted textures and partitioned patterns recall the intimate architecture of pubs: shared spaces designed for conversation, nostalgia, and belonging. Audio reactivity animates shifting light on the glass.
Each Wetherspoon pub has its own carpet patterns, designed to reflect local identity—are overlaid with a restless eyeball, darting across the surface. The carpet becomes a metaphor for “public art underfoot,” ordinary yet charged with narrative. The anxious gaze mirrors the act of people-watching in pubs, where drinking and spectating blur into ritual. Psychedelic color overlays heighten the surreal, making the familiar floor vibrate with shared energy.
The iconic Underground roundel is layered with ornate Victorian patterns, bridging the historic with the modern. Since 1863, the Tube has been London’s circulatory system—over four million journeys made each day. In this set, the Underground symbol becomes a pulsing node of transit, rhythm, and urban continuity.
Inspired by London’s graffiti traditions and spaces like Leake Street Arches beneath Waterloo station, this set foregrounds raw urban texture and public mark-making. Legal and illegal graffiti together form an evolving urban canvas: art by anyone, art for everyone. The arches are both gritty and communal, resonating with voices that resist erasure. Audio-reactivity floods the walls with color and pattern, capturing the energy of London’s street-level creativity.
This sequence embraces a punk-inflected, neo-psychedelic aesthetic. Fragmented eyes float within glitching, morphing geometries—watching, being watched, caught in transformation. Referencing expressive eye makeup and DIY cut-paper collages, it channels London’s nightlife and music culture. Fluid distortions, glowing edges, and glitch splatters create a dreamy yet disruptive atmosphere: a hallucinatory dream-space on the edge of chaos.