No two workspaces are quite the same.
Give ten people the same set of tools and they will find ten different ways to use them. The job, the location and the person behind the screen all shape the setup.
For French visual artist Sébastien Mercier, that setup can change completely from one project to the next. One night he might be performing alongside a DJ. Another might see him controlling visuals inside an immersive dome, or turning a portable monitor into an interactive canvas for an installation.
The technology travels with him, but what it becomes depends on the work.
Sébastien creates live visuals for musicians, performances and installations. His work has taken him from agency graphic design into a much harder-to-define world of live music, interactive art, projection, sound and technology.
Eventually, he left agency life to pursue visual art full time.
“I don’t feel like I’ve changed my line of work. It’s just that now it’s applied to music.”
Today that can mean creating visuals on stage, video jockey (VJ) sets, identities for artists, vinyl sleeves and cassettes, or building installations for brands and events.
And because much of that work happens live, his workspace needs to travel with him.
Building a control room wherever the performance happens
One recent project took Sébastien to Montreal, where he worked with dancer Pax and musician and producer Lunice on a performance at the Society for Arts and Technology.
The performance took place inside its immersive dome and brought dance, sound and visuals together as parts of the same work.
“We tried to make all of those aspects just like limbs of the same entity,” Sébastien says.
That meant the visuals couldn't simply be prepared in advance and left to run. Sébastien needed to respond to what was happening in the room.
“The ability to improvise and to react and to look at the performance, the dance and like switch stuff on and off” was central to the setup.
The interaction worked both ways. He could respond visually to the dancer, while she could see the visuals and change her performance in response.
“It was like a kind of ping pong” between the three performances.
Behind it was a surprisingly compact setup.
Sébastien ran the performance from a PC with an NVIDIA 4070 graphics card and TouchDesigner, the visual development platform that has become the centre of his work.
His espresso Display became the control surface.
“I used the espresso Display to build the control surface. So I would have just everything at the fingertips.”
From there he could manage four camera feeds, seven different visual universes, lighting and transitions.
Rather than constantly moving between menus and windows, Sébastien built an interface specifically for the performance.
“I build the interface to have everything just at the fingertips and like two clicks away from transitioning from one universe to the other.”
It is a good example of how personal a workspace can become.
For someone else, a portable monitor might be an extra desktop. In Sébastien's hands, it is something he can configure around the performance happening in front of him.
Building the tool you want to use
TouchDesigner sits at the centre of Sébastien's work.
He uses it to create the visuals themselves, but also to build the interfaces he uses to control them.
When he first started working with the touchscreen on his espresso Display, he realised he could recreate some of the physical controls he was accustomed to using on stage.
“When I do a performance with a MIDI controller, I also clone my MIDI controller and do it as a touch screen controller.”
That gives him a backup during a live performance. If there is an issue with the physical controller, he can jump onto the display and continue.
More interestingly, it changes what the controller can be.
A traditional MIDI controller arrives with knobs, buttons and sliders already in place. Those physical controls inevitably shape how someone interacts with it.
A touchscreen starts somewhere else.
“When you have a touch screen, then you have to build it yourself,” Sébastien says. “You have to decide, okay, what am I doing in this case?”
For him, that changes the creative process too.
“It also changes the way you think about making visual, you think about interacting with the visuals.”
That idea runs through much of Sébastien's work. The tools are there, but how they are used is up to the person using them.
It is one of the reasons he has settled so heavily on TouchDesigner.
He compares software to language. Photoshop opens with a blank rectangular canvas, which is already making certain decisions for you. TouchDesigner feels different to him.
“There's no purpose built in a language, it's just a set of tools.”
“That's what I like with TouchDesigner. It's just a set of tools that enables me to build whatever I want to.”
The question then becomes much simpler.
“What do I want to achieve and what do I need to build in order to achieve it?”
Making the computer part of the performance
There is another problem Sébastien has been trying to solve.
Watch a guitarist on stage and you can see them playing their instrument. Watch someone creating visuals behind a laptop and it can be much harder to understand what they're actually doing.
“You could be checking your emails, right?”
Sébastien laughs, but the point is a good one.
“You have your computers, you have your monitor being the like a barrier between you and the audience.”
So he started laying his espresso Display flat.
Instead of disappearing behind a conventional monitor, he can place the touchscreen alongside the other instruments and the audience into the process and give them a glimpse of how the visuals come to life. The display is magnetically attached to a stand which can be oriented in many different positions or can be laid flat on the table because it has a completely flat back.
“They see what's going on and they see that something is going on, even if the audience doesn’t understand exactly what you're doing.”
He compares it to watching someone play guitar.
“Even if you don't know the notes, even if you don't know the specifics, you know that something's happening.”
For a VJ set alongside a DJ, Sébastien specifically asked to be positioned at the same table.
“There’s like the DJ mixer and the controllers, and then the screen in the continuity.”
The portable monitor becomes part of the physical setup rather than a wall between Sébastien and the audience.
And when your equipment is exposed like that, what it looks like matters too.
Sébastien says that is one of the things he values about his espresso Display.
“I found that the design of the espresso Display is just so sleek.”
He contrasts it with other equipment he has used that looked out of place in a finished installation.
“When you try to make your stuff really polished and you have like a really ugly display, it's just… it's just a bit discouraging.”
For someone whose screen is often sitting in full view of an audience, that isn't an insignificant detail. The technology itself becomes part of the visual environment.
A studio that has to travel
The other constant is movement.
Sébastien's work doesn't happen in one studio. The equipment moves with him between performances, exhibitions, installations and cities.
That makes portability less of a convenience and more of a practical requirement.
His own travel arrangements have, at times, been considerably less polished than the installations he creates.
Asked how he had been protecting his espresso Display while travelling, Sébastien explained that he was still using an older folding cover.
“I wrap it in some shirts.”
It is a small detail, but a pretty accurate picture of what working on the road can look like. The equipment goes into carry-on luggage, gets unpacked at a venue, plugged into a different setup and then packed up again for whatever comes next.
The same portable monitor can end up doing something completely different at the next destination.
From control surface to canvas
For another installation, Sébastien took the idea of the screen as an interface much further.
The project was installed inside a centuries-old barn. The walls were mapped with projections, with the espresso Display sitting at the centre of the experience.
This time, the people controlling it weren't visual artists or musicians.
They were kids.
“They could draw anything on the display. And when they released the finger, it flew on the walls.”
A child could draw something directly onto the touchscreen, lift their finger and watch their creation leave the display and appear on the walls around them, joining the other drawings already moving through the space.
It is difficult to imagine a better example of how differently the same piece of technology can be used.
In Montreal, the display gave Sébastien access to camera feeds, lighting and visual worlds during a live performance.
Beside a DJ, it becomes something closer to an instrument.
Here, it became a canvas.
He has taken a similar approach with his own solo work, where audiences can move from watching a piece to controlling it themselves.
“There was like idle mode, like the piece would move by itself, but also a mode with which you could just directly interact with the piece and control it by yourself, like manual mode kind of.”
Finding your own category
Spend time talking to Sébastien and it becomes clear that this willingness to rethink how tools are supposed to work isn't accidental.
His creative practice is heavily influenced by Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson.
He is interested in the assumptions built into how we understand things, and what happens when you start pulling those assumptions apart.
“When you manage to deconstruct them, then you can build something else.”
He applies that thinking to music, visuals, controllers and performance.
It also shapes his advice for people interested in doing this kind of work.
Creative work can be intimidating, he says, because of the pressure to constantly produce something new.
“Like every new project needs to be a world gold medal, which is really intimidating, right?”
His answer is not to try to beat everyone else at the same thing.
Find your own category.
“There’s a million way to break something in an interesting way. And usually it's ingrained in your own experience and your own hobbies.”
“Don't try to copy what someone else do. Just try to look inward.”
It might take longer, he says, but the result is something that actually belongs to you.
“You won't feel that you're racing behind someone else because you're the only one in the race.”
“And it's not even a race, right?”
The same thinking applies to the tools he carries with him.
A portable monitor can be an extra screen. It can also be a controller, an instrument, a canvas or the point where an audience reaches into an artwork.
The hardware might be the same.
What matters is whose hands it's in.