bits and pieces

bits and pieces began with a pile of leftover textiles from a summer project — scraps of fabric that felt too alive to throw away. The installation asks: what can you make beautiful out of what remains? Each textile section becomes a distinct screen, catching and warping projected light differently depending on its texture, weave, and color.

The work started from a glitchy, pixelated aesthetic — that raw, tech-forward visual language of corrupted data and digital noise. But it pivoted toward something warmer: the glitch meets the handmade. The textiles soften the harshness of the digital effects, and the projection reveals colors that the fabric never had on its own.

"I want people to feel excited when they interact with this — a sense of play, of discovery, of trying something new together."

The Pivot

The original concept leaned fully into tech — sharp, cold, pixelated. But incorporating the textiles as projection surfaces opened up something unexpected. Different sections of fabric produce entirely different visual effects: a loose knit scatters light, a dense weave holds it, a sheer piece lets it bleed through. The projection doesn't just sit on the textile — it becomes part of it.

Interaction

Hand tracking via the MediaPipe plugin in TouchDesigner puts the visitor inside the piece. As people move their hands through the space, they disturb the projected visuals in real time — triggering glitch effects, shifting color fields, and warping patterns across the textile surfaces. There's no instruction. The invitation is simply to reach in and see what happens.

Technical Approach

TouchDesigner handles the real-time visual generation and projection mapping, with MediaPipe providing skeleton and hand-tracking data through a webcam feed. Each textile section is mapped independently, allowing different visual effects — pixelation, color shift, texture noise — to respond to the same gesture differently depending on where the hand is in space.