Senior Project · Interactive Art Installation · 2026
An immersive, interactive art installation where the audience becomes the artwork. Your presence, movement, and participation are not just witnessed — they are the piece.
YOU ARE THE VISUAL is an interactive audiovisual installation inspired by Insomniac/EDM rave culture, where the participant becomes the main performer. Using a Kinect V2 sensor and TouchDesigner, the system tracks body movement and audio frequencies in real time and transforms them into dynamic visuals — making every visitor the driving force behind what appears on screen.
There is no pre-existing image to look at: the piece only comes into existence when a person steps into it. Every movement you make — the way you raise your arms, shift your weight, or dance — is read by the system and translated directly into visual output. The installation is never the same twice, because no two people move the same way. You are not watching the visuals. You are generating them.
When you enter the installation, you are not the audience. You are the artist, the canvas, and the brushstroke — all at once. Your presence activates everything.
In-progress documentation showing the building of the installation, process mockups, and previews of the work as it will appear when completed. This section will be updated with exhibition photos and videos once the project is fully presented.
This interactive art installation was inspired by my experiences at EDM festivals and the immersive art environments that exist within that scene. These festivals are not just about music — they are spaces where visual art, light, motion, and technology come together to create transformative experiences. I've always been drawn to the way multimedia visuals respond to sound, space, and audience presence, creating an environment that feels alive and constantly evolving. These moments showed me how art can move beyond passive viewing and instead become something the audience actively participates in.
"These festivals showed me how art can move beyond passive viewing and instead become something the audience actively participates in."
I have also been heavily influenced by multimedia video works that incorporate advanced visual effects and experimental videography techniques. These works push the boundaries of traditional video by transforming it into something immersive, reactive, and experiential. Seeing how visual effects, motion graphics, and digital manipulation can completely reshape perception inspired me to explore how video could exist not just on a screen, but as part of an interactive system.
This project combines my interests in video production, multimedia design, and interactive technology to create an installation that responds to the presence and actions of the viewer. Similar to interactive festival installations, this piece invites the audience to become part of the artwork rather than simply observe it. By integrating video, digital media, and interaction, I aim to create an experience that feels immersive, dynamic, and alive — blurring the line between viewer and artwork. Ultimately, this installation reflects my goal of using multimedia and technology to create emotionally engaging environments that connect people to art in a more direct and participatory way.
The installation is built on a Kinect V2 + TouchDesigner pipeline. The Kinect V2 sensor tracks the participant's full skeleton in real time — reading joint positions, movement speed, and body orientation across 25 tracking points. That data streams into TouchDesigner, where a custom network of nodes translates the raw movement data into generative visuals: geometry, particle systems, color, and motion that respond directly to what the body is doing. The goal is to also integrate audio frequency analysis so that the bass, mid, and high-frequency content of the music further drives the visual output — making the whole system react to both the body and the sound simultaneously.
"The technical pipeline mirrors the concept: Kinect sees you, TouchDesigner becomes you."
The build process has focused on two core challenges: movement tracking and reactive visuals. Getting the Kinect skeleton data to feel expressive rather than mechanical required significant tuning — smoothing noisy joint data, mapping movement ranges to visual parameters, and making sure the system responds intuitively without lag. The visual layer in TouchDesigner is designed to feel like rave-inspired generative graphics: bright, kinetic, and tied to the energy of whoever is in the space. As the project develops, audio-reactive components will be layered in to complete the full audiovisual loop.
I'm Noah Gallardo, a 4th year student at UC San Diego studying Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts (ICAM) — a program that lives at the intersection of technology, media, and creative practice. I'm passionate about filmmaking, mixed media, and interactive art, and I'm driven by the idea that the most powerful experiences happen when technology and human expression become impossible to separate.
"I've always been drawn to art that doesn't just ask you to watch — it asks you to feel, move, and become part of it."
A huge part of my creative vision comes from electronic dance music — the festivals, the raves, the immersive art installations that exist inside them. These environments introduced me to a kind of art that is inseparable from its audience: light rigs reacting to sound, visuals built for a crowd in motion, experiences designed to be felt rather than just seen. Watching artists create real-time visuals for DJs and stage productions showed me how technology could be transformed into something visceral and alive.
That inspiration flows directly into YOU ARE THE VISUAL. The mixed media effects I use in my own video work — layering, manipulation, real-time transformation — find a new form here in an interactive installation where your body becomes the raw material. For me, this project is a synthesis of everything I care about: filmmaking, digital media, interactive technology, and the energy of a crowd that doesn't know it's performing.