For the incredible electronic music artist Sahej Bakshi - Dualist Inquiry, we created visuals to accompany his new album "When We Get There". Drawing from a wide range of genre inspirations ranging from house and breaks to dub, ambient and experimental synthwave, the album is presented as a a nine track record that reflects on the irreversible, unidirectional nature of time.
The performance premiered at the Magnetic Fields Festival 2023, followed by a unqiue performance for Lolapalooza, Mumbai, 2024 - and then went on to tour across several festivals and club shows.
Performance
The visuals were an outcome of creative and technical exlorations combined with digging into thematic depth of the music which emanated from current narratives of the artists life’s transitions and personal growth. After weeks of visual exploration - we narraowed down the approach to using point cloud scans as the visual language as it captures Time and Space - in a fragmented way - with imperfections, which was a visual metephor for how our own memory works with passage of time.
Early Tests with scans to obtain Point Cloud data of a real scene
Photogrammetry scans of 100s of locations around Goa, followed by converting raw scans to Point Clouds
Realtime manipulation of Point Clouds XYZ Co-ordinates using Audio Data (the music) on Touchdesigner and Blender.
Adding camera movements and connecting other visual parameters such as colours, size to the music to create audio recactive visuals.
Selective editing of the generative visual output to a fully timecoded sequence for live show playback on Resolume.
Lolapalooza commisioned Dualist to bring on a unique performance with a 9 piece band and a custom visual setup.
We built an extension of the screen to highlight the 9 piece band formation. Additional LED screens along with new visuals were added to play with layers of perception.
We also created animations for the online release of the album and singles. These were made in an old school collage style motion - combined with new genAI manipulations to create varied frames of the original artworks.
Credits
Client : Dualist Inquiry (Sahej Bakshi)
Artist Manager : Intersect9 (Henna Brar)
Visual Design, Animation & Live VJing : Ocupus
Visual Contributor : Jasan Waldura
Album Art Designer (collage) : Nick Calabrese