That Was The Week That Was — 23rd November 2025

Following an email from David Connor, Tutor for Architecture + Design at the University of Salford, I found myself on a train heading to the University campus to give a lecture about my work and my career.

David was amazed that I had left school at sixteen, with one 'O' level in art (grade C if I remember correctly) and never went to university. Going to university was never something that was discussed growing up, and to be honest I never liked school or academia. I tolerated it because I had to. I couldn't even be bothered playing "hooky" from school. Seemed like too much effort. I just kept my head down and got through it.

After setting up and connecting to the two large screens in the class-room via Wifi – like magic – I took the class through various projects together with some of the things I've learned so far. There was some great questions at the end which is always nice to see. After the talk, David and a couple of the other lecturers took me for a quick drink in The Pint Pot, the local pub around the corner and one of the few places open on a Monday night around the university. I think our presence doubled the amount of people in there.

Drift

The next day I remembered how I used to use my own self-made presentation software when giving these talks, but had got out of doing so and had gone back to Keynote. I really had no idea why I had reverted back to the default – I think it may have been when certain conferences asked me to make the talk in Keynote or something – so as I had a bit of downtime this week I thought I'd resurrect the old system but remake it in Touch Designer. The previous systems had been built in Processing and OpenFrameworks, all based on the idea of folders containing text files, images and videos. I love the simplicity of a file-based system and I've been a long time fan of the interoperability of a text file.

Over the next few days — as The Jam's All Mod Cons dominated the turntable — I gradually built a complete new system, but using the same format as before. Called DRIFT, I created a system using a series of points in three dimensional space for layout and navigation together with a slide overview, auto layout of slides containing text, strong typography and even a real-time drone SFX when the system was in what I called "preview" mode, to use before starting a talk or when there's a Q&A session at the end.

GPU v CPU

What's nice about using points in a 3D space to lay things out is that it's trivial to try a different layout whether that's size, density or position. I also felt it represented me and how I work much more than a linear flat system. A collection of seemingly disparate things, existing in a three-dimensional space which can be brought together and combined in different ways to make something new.

Technically, each slide was actually a texture on a 16:9 ratio rectangular plane positioned at one of the points in the created 3D space, all handled by the GPU rather than the CPU, using instancing, which meant it was super fast and smooth, able to maintain 60 fps without skipping a beat. Instead of moving the camera through the space I opted for moving / offsetting the geometry to the origin point (0,0,0) of the camera which made it easy than having to deal with perspective issues. The tweening is all done using a filter CHOP rather than any kind of tween library, which again keeps things simple and fast.

Below is a short video of the system in action.