Belongings

Everything you own has been somewhere before it reached you, and will go somewhere after.

Belongings asks visitors to hand over something of their own. A key, a mug, a worn pair of glasses, placed on a lit table in front of a camera. The object is seen, cut out of the room around it, and dissolved into a pointcloud on the screen above. Then it starts to speak, as the object, as itself, and asks the visitor about their relationship. The exhibition around it argues that durability is not only a question of materials but of attachment, and the installation is where that argument is put to the visitor directly.

The whole system runs locally and is orchestrated in TouchDesigner. A camera watches the table through a custom detection layer that can tell a placed object from a passing hand, and when a placement holds the frame is sent to a Segment Anything 2 server running on the same machine, which returns a mask. The cutout becomes a point cloud that carries the object’s own colour and silhouette before drifting apart.

The conversation is built in two steps. A vision model looks at the segmented image and returns a short description of what it sees together with a personification, which is a single sentence written in the object’s own voice. That sentence is prepended to a base prompt and handed to a larger text model, which roleplays as the object from there. A small vision model for identifying and characterising, a larger one for holding the conversation, so the object is defined in one pass and then stays in character for the rest of the session.

A voice activity detector runs inside TouchDesigner so only real speech is passed on, transcription is handled by a local whisper.cpp server, and replies are voiced by Kokoro as they stream out of the text model rather than after the full response has generated, which keeps the object answering at conversational speed. Nothing leaves the machine.

The piece is staged across four surfaces, two screens and two projections. When the object is lifted from the table the cloud disperses and the room falls back to an idle soundscape composed for the space.