VJing for Cool Dub Club
Live visuals for a Thai-fusion dub set, built as a tower through the Buddhist Three Worlds. I built three of its floors.
Problem
Cool Dub Club play dub in their own Thai-fusion style, with Thai instruments and Thai vocals over a dub structure. Live visuals for a set like this usually translate the music literally. A drum hit becomes a flash, a vocal becomes a waveform, and the music gets reduced to a trigger.
Solution
We used the visuals to widen the listening experience instead of describing it. The set was built around ช้างเอราวัณ 33 เศียร, a Thai poem that builds dread out of absurdly multiplying numbers, and staged inside ไตรภูมิ, the Buddhist Three Worlds cosmology, as one tower that the audience travels through floor by floor.
My involvement
I was one of eight visual artists. I modeled, lit and rendered three floors of the tower (4, 5 and 9), which became part of the asset library we pushed, distorted and recombined live during the show.
- Deliverables
- 3DAudio VisualLive Performance
- Type
- University project (Commde, Chulalongkorn)
- Team
- Nattakit Sunthonthip
- Athiphu Mahapotikul
- Jiranan Nampaisarn
- Manamon Vorarat
- Natdanai Limsumangkhonkun
- Panicha Ratanawichit
- Tanrutai Luangsuree
- Thanapan Tiratatri
- Credit
- Music: Cool Dub Club
- Project Length
- 8 Weeks
Research & Rationale
The Poem:ช้างเอราวัณ 33 เศียร describes Indra's elephant, Erawan. It has 33 heads, each head has seven tusks, each tusk holds seven lotus ponds, and the count keeps multiplying until the numbers stop making sense. We wanted the visuals to feel like that count: calm at first, then far too much to take in.
The World:ไตรภูมิ stacks the universe into realms, with heavens above, the human world in the middle and hells below, all resting on a giant fish. We built it as one vertical tower and split it into floors, so each artist could own one level of the cosmos and the set could move down through them.
Process
Every floor started as a gray model and a wireframe, so we could check its scale against the rest of the tower before any lighting or materials went in.
Floor 4:This floor is where the counting happens. I repeated a few objects, like cars, flowers, cubes and rings, in ring after ring around a central core until the structure becomes too dense to read, the same way the poem does with numbers.
Lighting took more than a dozen test renders, from a floor flooded in orange to near-black with hard beams cutting through the rings.
Floor 5:In the Three Worlds, Mount Meru stands at the center of the universe, with the sun and moon circling it. I built this floor as a single spire with orbit rings turning around it, so the whole cosmos moves around one axis.
Floor 9:The bottom of the tower: a pit of fire below and the giant fish that holds the whole world up.
Design & Deliverables
Each floor was rendered as loops and kept as a library of separate assets, along with its white wireframe version. During the set the visual team layered, distorted and switched between them live, following the band instead of a fixed timeline.
The Show
Cool Dub Club played the set live with the visuals projected behind them.
