Live visuals are moving images generated, mixed or manipulated in real time during a performance. They can combine video clips, cameras, animation, generative graphics and audio-reactive systems.
In the late 1950s, Jordan Belson worked with composer Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium. Rather than projecting a conventional film onto one rectangular screen, they used the planetarium environment for combinations of abstract imagery, electronic music and spatial projection. The Center for Visual Music considers the Vortex events important…
Toshio Matsumoto did not limit experimental film to unusual images inside a conventional cinema screen. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked with expanded cinema, questioning what his retrospective material describes as the standard “one projector, one screen” relationship between film and audience. For My Crushed Right Eye from 1968 could be presented…
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…
Ryoichi Kurokawa’s syn_ is an audiovisual performance built as a diptych with 2.1-channel sound. First created in 2011, it has been performed internationally in spaces ranging from Tokyo’s Studio Coast to festivals and arts centres in Europe and North America. Kurokawa describes his broader practice in terms of constructing audiovisual phenomena from field recordings and…
Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s async–immersion transforms an album into something closer to an audiovisual environment. The installation was first shown in 2023 inside the basement of the former Kyoto Shimbun newspaper printing plant. Sound engineer ZAK remixed Sakamoto’s async for a 35-speaker system, while Takatani’s imagery occupied a 26.4-metre-wide LED screen. What interests me…
