Synthetic Sirens

What happens to us as humans — our shared humanity — living in algorithmic societies?

Synthetic Sirens surrounds visitors with floor-to-ceiling projections that respond to the bodies moving through the space. At the centre stands a ring light: the tool of the influencer, the symbol of the creator economy. The system watches. The walls respond.

The operational core is a custom show control system built inside TouchDesigner. Rather than running as a passive generative loop, the installation is programmed as a scored performance: a preset engine snapshots any combination of parameter states across the whole TD network, a cue list sequences those presets in order, and a tweener handles animated transitions between them with configurable easing curves. An operator steps through cues like a lighting console — each go fires a timed, interpolated transition into the next state. This is what made a seven-month exhibition run reliable: the piece has explicit states, not just a loop that might drift.

Camera-based audience sensing feeds a particle system that translates live crowd data into visual material. Visitors shape what appears on the walls without knowing exactly how.

The visual output runs in Unreal Engine, which gave us the rendering quality a space this scale demanded. TouchDesigner acts as the connective tissue — routing sensing data into physics, physics into rendering, keeping everything synchronised and running unattended across a seven-month exhibition run.

Shown at MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, January – July 2026.