Blog - Lumlux Art

3 Oct 2026 BYOB

BYOB Opens the Walls

BYOB began from a practical observation. Rafaël Rozendaal was living in Berlin and noticed that many artists around him owned projectors. Instead of waiting for a museum to supply equipment, walls and a finished curatorial structure, he and Anne de Vries invited artists to bring their own beamers to a one-night exhibition in 2010. The instruction was deliberately simple: find a space, invite many artists, ask them to bring a projector.
That simplicity changed the social structure of the exhibition. Each projector created a temporary territory, but light could overlap, spill across architecture or collide with another work. Installation happened quickly and remained visible as a process. Cables, tables and improvised surfaces were not backstage problems. They became part of an event assembled by the participants themselves.
Rozendaal kept BYOB as an open format rather than a protected franchise. It travelled to other cities because the idea could be repeated without reproducing the original exhibition exactly. The projector was both display device and admission ticket.
For a contemporary VJ, BYOB still offers a useful correction to the pressure for ever larger screens. A strong projection does not begin with scale. It begins with a clear relationship between image, surface, neighbouring light and the people moving through the room.

Austin Lee interviews Rafaël Rozendaal for SFAQ magazine

#BYOB #RafaelRozendaal #ProjectionArt #DigitalArt #VJCulture

BYOB Opens the Walls Rafaël Rozendaal Austin Lee interviews Rafaël Rozendaal for SFAQ magazine - Rafaël Rozendaal Austin Lee interviews Rafaël Rozendaal for SFAQ magazine. New York, February 2014. AL: Your artwork has strong ties to both painting and animation. How do you think about time in both mediums and how does it function in your work? RR: I’m interested in movement, and I’m interested in staring. That means I want to […]

26 Aug 2026 Culture Before Video Oskar

VJ Culture Before Video

Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed.

During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik performances used several film and slide projectors simultaneously to create abstract moving environments. Elsewhere he explored single-frame animation, scratching directly onto film and even experiments in drawn optical sound.

This is where experimental-film history begins to overlap surprisingly well with modern VJ culture.

A contemporary VJ can run several video layers, blend them, map them onto architecture and synchronise them with music in realtime. Fischinger had none of that digital flexibility. Every additional projector was another physical machine, another film path and another alignment problem.

Yet the artistic question was already there.

Why should cinema consist of one rectangular image directly in front of a seated audience?

Once several projections begin occupying space, the screen stops being only a window. Light itself becomes material.

Fischinger later became famous for tightly synchronised abstract animation, but I find these earlier multiple-projection experiments even more interesting today.

The technology is obsolete.

The idea is not.

A century later, Resolume, projection mapping and immersive audiovisual performances are still exploring what happens when moving images escape from a single screen.

https://centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/

#OskarFischinger #VisualMusic #ExpandedCinema #VJCulture

VJ Culture Before Video centerforvisualmusic.org Fischinger - CVM pages Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed. During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik...

24 Aug 2026 Audiovisual Art

Visuals From Particle Physics

Herman Kolgen’s ISOTOPP grew from a residency at GANIL, the French heavy-ion research facility. Rather than using particle physics simply as futuristic decoration, the Montréal multimedia artist developed an audiovisual work around molecular abstraction and energy transfer. The project eventually became a black-and-white audiovisual performance.

That starting point interests me from a VJ perspective.

Visual performance often begins with images that already look interesting. Film fragments, generated geometry, typography or textures are then synchronised to music. Kolgen’s approach suggests another possibility: begin with a process that is normally invisible and ask how it might acquire both image and sound.

The scientific phenomenon is not automatically the artwork. Transformation is still required.

But it gives the audiovisual system a shared conceptual source. Sound and image do not have to be connected only because a visual event happens on the beat. They can behave like two different outputs generated from the same underlying idea.

That feels much closer to composing audiovisual work than simply decorating music with moving pictures.

https://montreal.mutek.org/en/artists/herman-kolgen

#HermanKolgen #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals #VJCulture

Visuals From Particle Physics MUTEK Montréal Herman Kolgen | MUTEK Montréal MUTEK is a Montréal-based festival dedicated to the promotion of electronic music and the digital arts.Edition 27, from August 25 to 30, 2026.MUTEK…