Pony Dash

Pony Dash is an audio-reactive video artwork created in collaboration with underground acid music producer King Mental for his track Rainbow Dash. The piece was developed using OpenFrameworks and a set of custom tools I built for the project, continuing my ongoing exploration of generative art and sound.

The work began with a low-poly image of Pony Dash, which I processed in Blender to prepare it for use as a mesh in OpenFrameworks. Once formatted, I created an application that made the mesh audio-reactive, generating a series of colourful, shifting clips that mirrored the manic energy of the track.

Alongside this, I wrote a custom video mixer to control randomised placement and triggering of the clips, and a shader to remove video backgrounds in real time. These elements came together in a live setup that allowed me to shape the final piece in response to the music itself.

Pony Dash reflects the modular, experimental approach that runs through much of my work — building flexible tools that can be re-used and extended in future projects, while pushing at the edges of what generative art and audio-visual coding can achieve.

The production began with sourcing a low-poly image of "Pony Dash," which was then imported into Blender and prepared for integration with OpenFrameworks. I created a custom application to make the mesh audio-reactive, requiring it to be formatted as a triangle-only, ASCII-enabled ply file. Once the mesh was formatted, I generated a series of colorful, short, audio-reactive clips.

A key component of the project was the development of a custom video mixer application. I needed to control the random placement of videos on the screen and trigger them via keyboard input. To achieve the desired final effect, I also wrote a shader to remove the video background. After fine-tuning the code, I used this live setup to produce the final work.