TouchDesigner: An Artistic Breadboard

It's been a while since I did the responsible thing and started learning TouchDesigner, which I had never touched in prior work. It was a pretty painful process at first, but I think I'm at a place where the learning curve started to smooth out. I met a whole alphabet: TOPs, CHOPs, DATs, SOPs, POPs. And yes, it is another node-based editor. Wire an output into an input, watch something happen, repeat.

But dragging those little connections around dislodged a memory I had not thought about in years. Sophomore year, an electric and electronic circuits course, a lab section full of logic gates. We built things on breadboards and described them in some language I have completely forgotten, running on some software I have also completely forgotten. Sorry, Mom and Dad.

A couple of assignments stuck though. One asked us to build AND, OR, and NOT gates using only NAND gates, which sounded like a riddle and mostly felt like one too. Another was a counter that ticked up every time you flipped a switch. Small stubborn pieces assembled from even smaller pieces.

That is what TouchDesigner feels like to me. You take nodes that each do one thing and wire them into something bigger that does something surprising. The breadboard just traded copper and resistors for pixels and signals.

So maybe the software changed and I did not. Or maybe some old toggle in my head got flipped, a counter quietly ticking up, and here I am wired to a trigger again.