Code Glyphs

Code Glyphs is an interactive immersive installation developed as my BA thesis in Media Design at IED Roma for Bright Festival. Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s technium and the everyday “water” we stop noticing, the piece asks how aware we are of the technologies that shape us, and how easily habit feeds systems we barely understand.

Wrapped in darkness by a semicircular LED wall, visitors approach four tablets arranged in the same curve. Typing letters, words, or phrases feels like a game, yet each character is remapped into a custom glyph alphabet and poured into the wall as evolving vertical streams. Habitual finger motion becomes nourishment: what begins as innocent input accumulates until glitch, overload, and a shifting AI silhouette emerge. The digital language mutates; the machine that seemed controllable starts to look autonomous; the visitor realises they were always part of the loop.

A Flutter app on the four iPads sends typed text to TouchDesigner, which remaps every character into glyphs, drives four vertical columns, glitch lines, and matrix-like geometric fields, then stages the installation’s phases: idle multilingual flux, interaction, saturation, AI silhouette, and a closing QR that lets visitors take home the AI animation. ComfyUI / Stable Diffusion generated the AI animation material; TouchDesigner remains the realtime spine that binds input, visual language, and sequence.

Completed as BA thesis work at IED Roma, Code Glyphs turns a familiar gesture (typing on a screen) into a public ritual of co-evolution. Visitors leave not only with an image of the wall’s climax, but with a QR-linked AI animation they helped generate: proof that they were never only spectators.