On September 25, The NODE Institute joined Pollen – 90mil Radio’s day-into-night festival marking two years of transmission – for the 37th edition of TouchDesigner Roundtable Berlin. For one evening the Basement at 90mil became home to the TouchDesigner community: four talks on creative coding, real-time visuals and the practice behind them, followed by four hours of live visuals on the main floor.
The four talks could hardly have been more different – a venue and its broadcast platform, AI as a coding partner, VJing across very different rooms, and a kinetic laser installation – yet one thread kept coming back: decide what you actually want to make, and build only what gets you there.
Thank you to everyone who came out to 90mil, to our speakers and VJs, and to the whole crew who made the night run. If you missed it, the full stream is above.
20:00 UHR / 8:00 PM /
HILARY C/B (90MIL RADIO)
Hilary C/B, Creative Director of 90mil Radio, opened the night with the story of the place we were sitting in. The building near Jannowitzbrücke has been a furniture warehouse and a machine shop; today it is the club house of The Palace Collective, holding a radio station, a ceramics studio, an art school and a movement space under one roof – run by consensus and without public funding. Pollen itself is the annual fundraiser that keeps it going. The name, Hilary told us, goes back to a property developer who put the site’s value at 90 million euros – a number the collective kept as a quiet comment on what actually has value here.
From there the talk moved to 90mil Radio as a platform: the school’s roughly 30 workshops running each semester, and – a favourite in the Q&A – the station’s decentralised broadcasts from Tbilisi during the political unrest in Georgia. If you’re in Berlin and want more of this world, keep an eye out for the monthly Salon of Coincidence.
90mil.berlin
instagram.com/90mil___
20:30 UHR / 8:30 PM /
SIMONE FRANCO (UNVEIL)
Simone (Unveil Studio) talked about “vibe coding” – working with AI as a real collaborator rather than an autocomplete, and staying disciplined about it: one focused agent at a time instead of many running in parallel, strict Git hygiene, and checking every fix the AI claims to have made against the actual source. He showed where that way of working has taken him: interactive installations such as Particles Ensemble at the Schlosslichtspiele Karlsruhe, an immersive Hokusai exhibition whose paintings were animated locally with Wan2.1 in ComfyUI, and two custom TouchDesigner operators written in C++ and CUDA – clothPOP, a GPU cloth simulation driven entirely by point attributes, and RTX Render TOP, a real-time path tracer built on NVIDIA OptiX and denoised with DLSS Ray Reconstruction.
Simone’s slides are online, so you can scroll through the talk yourself, and both operators are available in his shop: presentation / shop
Simone is also sharing discount codes with the community – enter them at checkout in his shop:
clothPOP: C1NZC3MQ (€1 off)
RTX Render TOP: U2NJQYNA (€5 off)
youtube.com/@unveil7762
unveil-studio.netlify.app
unveil-studio.lemonsqueezy.com
21:20 UHR / 9:20 PM / TALILE CITHA
Talile’s talk was a reminder that the best visuals rarely come from the most complicated patch. Walking through work for techno club nights, intimate concerts and brand events, she made the case against what she calls the “engineering trap”: putting 90% of a project into backend complexity and leaving 10% for how it actually looks. Her throughline across very different rooms – high contrast, deliberate noise and glitch, and knowing when a simple feedback loop beats a clever system.
22:00 UHR / 10:00 PM / JONAS MARGRAF
Jonas closed the talks with PRECESSION, a kinetic audiovisual installation built with Lucas Weidinger: three rotating sculptures carrying twelve line lasers, synced to surround sound. His core message: “Start with the end in mind.” Rather than building one do-everything “mighty patch” and hoping the right output falls out of it, Jonas designs backwards from the exact result he’s after and builds only what that result needs. The same discipline runs through the engineering – modelling the motors’ physics inside TouchDesigner so software commands never ask more than the hardware can do, solving the classic 360° rotation wraparound, and running everything on a dedicated, wired, offline network. His rule: never Wi-Fi for live kinetic work.
jonasmargraf.com
instagram.com/jonas.margraf
0:00 – 4:00 UHR /
0 – 4 AM / VJ PERFORMANCES
After the talks the night moved upstairs to the main floor. Yuna Fleig (Ungrid Collective) opened the visuals at midnight, Antonia Angel and Talile Citha of Studio 1111 took over at 1:30, and Pauline Kess (Kollage Kollectiv) closed the night until 4:00 – running alongside Pollen’s programme of more than 50 artists across 90mil’s six spaces.
instagram.com/yuna_fleig
instagram.com/antoangel.zip
instagram.com/talilecitha
instagram.com/pauline.kess
Thank you
To Claudia Montesi and Vinay Charjan for documenting the night, to Lynn Mayya, Phelan Kane, Amin Shahsavar and Kunal Singh for making the Basement work on the night, to Hilary and the whole 90mil team for having us at Pollen, and to Simone, Talile and Jonas for their talks. See you at TouchDesigner Roundtable XXXVIII.
The TD Roundtable XXXVII WAS supported by:
Derivative / derivative.ca
90MIL / 90mil.berlin
The TD Roundtable XXXVII WAS MEETING AT:
90MIL
Jannowitzbrücke
10179 Berlin
Germany