Desktop Stories

Intro

Desktop Stories is the audiovisual live show I built together with musician Samson Brendonck for his individual graduation project. He came to me with a concept rooted in his own media consumption: sampling, internet culture, color as personal symbolism. And asked me to help shape that into something visual. We started from moodboards and a vision board built around his early demos, before any of it became technical.

Visual identity + website

Alongside the show itself, we developed a visual language that could carry across formats: a monochrome color per song, tied to both social meaning and personal association, and a website that acts as the project’s hub, presenting the music, the visuals and the process behind them as one piece, independent of platforms like YouTube or SoundCloud. It was also used during the show to create a cohesive experience.

Live visual system

The core of the collaboration was building a live, audio-reactive visual system from scratch. Samson’s setup runs on Ableton Live on stage; mine runs on TouchDesigner at the back of the room. We connected the two wirelessly with TDA Ableton, sending MIDI over OSC in both directions so audio and visuals could communicate in real time.

On the visual side, I built a modular pipeline: a performance dashboard to switch between songs and control fade/glitch intensity, live FFT analysis to read the music’s low-end, a media engine that auto-switches image folders and cuts video to the kick, and an FX rack that toggles between a colorful “Circuit Bending” CRT look and a black-and-white grain look, including a custom four-color look-up system, one palette per song.

Show

The system came together through rehearsals and try-outs before its first live run at Vuurdoop, where Samson’s music and the visuals played as a single, reactive show.