Everyone’s first installation fails in the same handful of ways, and none of them are artistic. The projector’s throw distance is wrong for the room. The laptop sleeps. The audio interface renumbers its channels after a reboot. Nobody asked who has the key on Sunday.
The Interactive & Immersive HQ — the TouchDesigner-centred publication run by people who do this commercially — published a beginner-friendly checklist for a first show, and it belongs in the same category as their earlier piece on essential kickoff documents as a creative technologist: the operational layer that determines whether the creative work ever gets seen.
Why a checklist rather than advice
Because the failure mode isn’t ignorance, it’s load. On install day you are solving five problems at once, tired, in an unfamiliar room, often with someone waiting on you. That’s precisely the state in which people forget to check whether the wall power circuit is shared with the café’s espresso machine.
Checklists exist for exactly this situation — they’re how aviation and surgery handle competent people under load. A creative technologist’s install week has the same structure: high stakes, time pressure, many small steps where one omission is expensive and invisible until it isn’t.
The categories that actually matter
Drawing on this and on what repeatedly goes wrong, the pre-show list a first-timer needs covers:
The room, measured. Throw distances, ceiling heights, sightlines, where the sun hits at 4pm, where power actually is versus where the plan says it is. Measure it yourself; venue drawings are frequently wrong.
Power. Total draw, circuit sharing, what else is on the breaker, and whether anything needs to survive the building’s overnight shutdown.
The machine. Sleep disabled, auto-update disabled, notifications off, auto-login on, your software set to launch and run on boot, and a tested recovery from cold power loss. The single most common installation failure is a computer that came back up showing a desktop.
Device identity. Audio interfaces, displays and USB devices that renumber or reorder on reboot will silently reroute your piece. Pin them, and test by actually rebooting.
Failure behaviour. What does the piece do when a sensor drops out, a network disappears, or a visitor does something unplanned? Designed degradation beats a crash and a visible error dialog.
The human layer. Who opens and closes. Who to call. A one-page runbook for venue staff written for someone who has never seen your software. This is the part technologists skip and regret.
Documentation, done during install. Photograph the rig before the panels go on. You will need to rebuild it.
The kickoff-documents companion
Their other piece — on essential kickoff documents — is the front end of the same discipline, and it’s the one that saves money rather than evenings. Scope, deliverables, who supplies the projector, what happens if the venue changes the wall, how many revisions, what “done” means. Creative technology commissions go wrong at the boundary between what the artist assumed and what the client assumed, and a kickoff document is where that boundary gets written down while everyone is still friendly.
The honest framing
None of this is interesting, and that’s the point worth making to anyone early in this practice: the ratio of unglamorous work to creative work in installation is roughly inverted from what you expect. The piece you designed is perhaps a third of the job. The rest is power, mounting, reliability, documentation and the social work of a venue.
People who last in this field are not the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones whose work is still running on day forty.