Mums Against Donk 3

Live performance system and real-time generative visuals for the third installment of London’s leading donk club night.

Taking influence from scratch video, early VJing and the event’s community, I created a live performance system for Mums Against Donk’s third event at Corsica Studios.

The system is built using TouchDesigner, utilising additional Python scripting to provide a user interface for control and feedback, alongside external MIDI input and audio-reactive manipulation of the visuals.

Mums Against Donk position themselves as a silly, satirical protest against donk music. To allow the visuals to better integrate with the event and their image, I took archival news footage that was critical of 90s warehouse parties and manipulated it to fit a new context, turning it on it’s head. This, combined with memes and stock video clips reminiscent of 2000s VJ compilation DVDs helped create a visual experience of Mums Against Donk’s spirit and music.

Looping 3D animations of acid smileys, ketamine and poppers are calls to donk and UK rave culture’s roots in acid house, and play on the event’s social reputation.

The TouchDesigner system takes an audio signal from the club’s front of house mixer and analyses it for frequency, allowing different elements of the visuals to react to different frequencies. The threshold and gain of each frequency band can be controlled using physical input from the MIDI controller.

Generative, stock footage, memes and overlay clips are assigned to buttons on the MIDI controller and correspond to the UI displayed on the laptop screen. Each column of clips has controls for playback speed, opacity and post-FX that allow complete control of the visuals throughout the internal processing chain.