Cascade Ephemera
Bad Pedestrian | 2026 | Proposal for HyperMedia, MAM Rome
A generative video installation in which a folder of hundreds of fragments of gathered ephemera, pulled from flea markets, city streets, personal archives, and recurring artistic motifs, including material collected in Rome itself, fall and dissolve across a single continuous canvas spanning a room's walls and floor.
Selection from 2024 “Mirrored Movement”
DESCRIPTION
The installation drops hundreds of transparent cutout collage materials across a single continuous canvas spanning MAM's walls and floor. On the walls, fragments accumulate and layer, slowly dissolving. On the floor, the same fragments sink, smear, and dissolve into feedback, absorbed as if into a different material entirely.
Despite the volume and speed of the images moving through the room, the piece is meant to feel calm. Fragments appear and disappear gradually, more like breathing than noise, a steady, soothing rhythm underneath the density of HyperMedia.
CONCEPT
Cascade Ephemera extends a system built after hand animating a piece that earned recognition at the Live Performers Meeting 2024 mapping competition in Morocco. Afterward, I built an automated system so I wouldn't have to animate that way by hand again:
The TouchDesigner network pulls from a folder of hundreds of collaged fragments, gathered from years of collecting, dropping in sync with the music in random orientation. That system became Mirrored Movement, an installation shown in New York later that year.
For MAM, the TD network is being rebuilt specifically for a room where floor and wall are one continuous surface.
Live Performers Meeting: Morocco 2024
Selection from 2024 work “Mirrored Movement”
TECHNICAL APPROACH
The piece runs on a TouchDesigner network built directly for MAM's pixel map, spanning the full wall and floor canvas. Collaged fragments spawn from a managed asset library with randomized position, rotation, scale, and fall timing, driven by audio analysis so the drop responds to the score.
Wall and floor regions run as separate composite chains sharing one spawn system: the wall chain composites fragments directly so they accumulate and layer, the floor chain routes them through a feedback loop masked to the floor's coordinates, producing the sinking, dissolving behavior specific to that surface.
The piece can be delivered as a real time TouchDesigner performance where images and videos can be added in real-time to the mix or rendered to a single video master synced to a fixed score, to play for the duration of the exhibition.
AUDIO
The score leans toward meditative, string based Italian or Mediterranean instrumental music, quiet and contemplative, matching the calm rhythm of the visuals despite the density of the imagery.
TIMELINE
Proposal: August 2026. System build and wall/floor testing: September 2026. Final delivery matching MAM's technical specifications: ahead of the October opening.