Ocupus

Dualist Inquiry: 'When We Get There'

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

Developing a Visual Language

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.

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Early Tests with scans to obtain Point Cloud data of a real scene

“One of the key themes of this album deals with the passage of time, and how we reflect on and remember our lives and memories from the present moment. We all hold memories that are precious to us, and yet they seem to fragment and distort over time, until all we have is a little nugget that we hold onto. We wanted to find a method of creating visuals that would reflect this kind of nostalgia and fragmentation
- Dualist Inquiry
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Techincal Workflow

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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.

Debut Show at Magnetic Fields Festival 2023

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The Road to Lolapalooza 2024, Mumbai

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.

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Scenes from various Festivals

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Album and Track Release Animations

 

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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