2022
5 Movements
5 Movements is a ten-minute immersive piece about body, space, and time. Five performers move through distinct choreographic languages while slit-scan and spatial projection turn motion into layered visual traces at architectural scale. Nohlab led creative direction; the work opened at Hall des Lumières in New York as part of a larger Culturespaces Digital production.
My contribution focused on the technical and visual system that made the slit-scan language work at that scale. The venue's topology, pixel density, and wall-to-floor geometry had to be solved first. Otherwise the effects would break the moment they left a single screen. Much of the wider production lived in After Effects; this section migrated into TouchDesigner instead, rebuilt as a custom real-time 3D environment with GLSL shaders and bespoke flows so teams could watch iterations live rather than wait on renders.
On the image side, I developed the floor and ceiling visuals, while the wall treatments grew together with Balkan Karışman. The shift to real-time changed the rhythm of the room: adjustments happened in the space, not in a render queue, and this section never returned to offline comp.
Continuity was the engineering heart of the piece: slit-scan traces staying readable at massive resolution, animating without seams across walls, floor, and ceiling, playback reliable enough for a public installation. Solving that pipeline is what made the immersive scale hold.
5 Movements is a 10-minute immersive audiovisual experience about the relationship between body movement, space, and time. Five performers move through distinct choreographic languages, while slit-scan and spatial projection techniques turn their motion into layered visual traces. The piece makes the in-between phases of movement visible at architectural scale.
The work draws from traditional dance, ballet, street styles, hip-hop, and contemporary performance. Its music moves across African rhythms, contemporary classical writing, electronica, instrumental hip-hop, and Asian references, bringing different movement histories into one immersive choreography.
Because the installation ran as a continuous public presentation rather than a single live performance, the visual system had to hold up well beyond one rehearsal. The slit-scan traces needed to stay legible at the venue’s full projection scale, track cleanly with each performer’s movement, and loop without visible seams across the room’s walls, floor, and ceiling. That reliability requirement is what pushed the build out of the wider production’s After Effects pipeline and into a custom real-time 3D environment in TouchDesigner: once the venue’s geometry and pixel density were solved and calibrated, the system could be trusted to run the piece night after night without a technician resetting it between shows.
Credits
DIRECTION & DESIGN: Nohlab
PRODUCTION: Culturespaces Digital
VISUAL ARTISTS: Nohlab, Balkan Karışman, Çağatay Güçlü (Defektu), Berkay Türk, Fehmican Gözüm, Taha Celal Yıldırım, Yasin Sinik
MUSIC DIRECTION, SOUND DESIGN & ORIGINAL MUSIC: Gökalp Kanatsız
TECHNICAL CONTENT DIRECTION: Fehmican Gözüm
NOHLAB TEAM
CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Candaş Şişman, Deniz Kader
PRODUCER: Yasemen Birhekimoğlu
MOTION DESIGNER: Begüm Tunçer
PERFORMANCE & LIVE VIDEO PRODUCTION: CPMistanbul - Cem Görk
PERFORMANCE CHOREOGRAPHER: Volkan Ersoy
PERFORMERS: Kaya Godfrey, Mine İzgi, Deniz Keskin, Büşra Ay
FILMING CREW
DIRECTOR: Cem Terbiyeli
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: İpek Erden
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Ferhat Uzundağ
COSTUME: Tuğçe Ülkümen
MAKEUP ARTIST: Tuğba Çolakoğlu
COMPOSITING: Mustafa Koç
PERFORMANCE FOOTAGE EDITOR: Teoman Küçükeren
PHOTOGRAPHY: Andrew Kelly [Reuters], Massimo Vendola, Özde Karadağ
VIDEO DOCUMENTATION: Noel Y. Calingasan, Özde Karadağ
