An Internal Other

The body as a site of transformation interrogated through gesture and answered in particles.

An Internal Other is an interactive installation created for Liquid Bodies, a dual exhibition at Medical Museion and Politikens Forhal in Copenhagen exploring stem cells, biotechnology, and the mutable boundaries of the human body.

Drawing on contemporary stem cell research, the work approaches the body not as a fixed entity but as a process of continuous transformation. Visitors encounter a system that responds to movement and gesture, translating bodily expression into dynamic visual formations that exist between biological and computational forms.

At its core, An Internal Other explores how emerging biotechnologies are reshaping ideas of identity, embodiment, and selfhood. It invites participants to reflect on the unfamiliar processes unfolding within their own bodies and on the increasingly porous boundary between the biological, the technological, and the imagined.

We built the installation in TouchDesigner. Hand tracking runs via MediaPipe to compute audiences pose that drives intersection tests and phase transitions. Each phase has its own logic for evaluating gesture state against visual targets, including a threshold region that detects when a raised hand crosses a defined boundary, advancing the sequence.

The particle system runs in two parallel variants: one traces the edge-detected body silhouette, the other fills the full body outline. Both are driven by Lucas-Kanade optical flow computed entirely on the GPU, so that movement in the image plane becomes force in the particle field. Parameter states across all four phases are managed using a preset system with named snapshots, tagging, and override modes controlling how transitions behave when live state conflicts with stored values.