Pathos Labs x Future of Life

The team at Pathos Labs we’re organizing an event for 100 of the most influential TV writers to gather in a room and convene about the different effects AI will have on the environment, culture, government, and the world at large. Pathos envisioned a UN style set where experts came to discuss their domains of expertise, followed by live voting that altered the projector screens that bathed the room in visualizations.

And I was fortunate enough to be tapped to lead as Creative Technologist and Technology Director for the event. This required me to give technical input for potential AV vendors, show control for the different stages of the event, and designer and developer of the reactive visuals using participants phone’s as a voting platform.

The project was broken down into developing the voting platform that participants used to cast their opinions as well as the main TouchDesigner server that received the live data. I chose an astro and supabase stack because of their flexibility and documentation. Being a one man band meant that I had to lean vibe coding tools to stand up the voting platform quickly.

Next was connecting the voting platform via WebSockets to the TouchDesigner project. SupaBase was a great choice for this as it enables live pub/sub broadcasting so the web server can broadcast a message to TouchDesigner every time a vote is cast. Doing this through the socket server means that we don't interrupt the main Touch thread so that we have performant visuals come show time.

The last stage was narrowing down the look and feel of the live visualizations. Unfortunately this project was quite the technical undertaking for one person with a very short production window. So if I had more time I would have spent more giving more nuance and life to the visualizations. That being said, the event went on without a hitch as we had over 1800 responses once the show had wrapped. Which means that for the 19 questions polled to the TV writers we had 94% participation across the whole event!

• TouchDesigner
• Runway AI
• WebSockets
• SupaBase
• Astro