LURKER

A REALTIME AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCE

BEHIND THE SCENES

It's hairless cats and driverless cars!

LURKER is a 40-minute playground of real-time game engine visuals, joystick control, audio-reactive design, and pumping cinematic/electronic music mashed in one.

Cats, icons of early internet culture and frequent subjects in computer vision tests, become our guide through a world built for machines. The journey ends in a two-minute strobe assembled from more than two thousand AI-generated cat images—a final jolt that closes the loop between meme, machine, and myth.

BEHIND THE SCENES

I collaborated with Hyperdense Studio on show and systems control. With James Roha, we built a custom joystick workflow that lets me switch on the fly between spline-driven moves and cinematic camera presets—treating the set like a live game playthrough with constraints that preserve a cinema-quality look.

We also created an OSC pipeline that routes the music through TouchDesigner to drive Unreal’s audio-reactive elements: part of the scene maps to low/high frequency bands, while the rest I adjust live via MIDI controllers for a spontaneous, organic feel.

While the performance runs live in a real-time game engine, the finale is a two-minute, high-intensity strobe sequence created with Creative Technologist Eric Joo using various AI techniques. For one segment, Eric built a custom workflow that starts with a previz/camera pass in Unreal Engine, giving us a stable camera base to avoid heavy AI hallucination; he then refined style and continuity in ComfyUI.

Another segment uses 2,000+ Midjourney frames assembled into a simple, relentless strobe: the hairless cat slowly pushes toward camera and opens its mouth. Together, these parts deliver a deliberately jarring, high-impact ending.

Performance at Diskokina, July 2025, Los Angeles