One of the questions I am asked most often is whether the visuals I use during a performance are simply „videos“ that are played back.
The answer is no.
Every performance begins long before the first piece of music is played. I build a growing visual vocabulary from photographs, video recordings, digital artwork, generative imagery, and, occasionally, material kindly contributed by collaborating artists.
Each element is then transformed. Images are layered, colours are shifted, textures are introduced, movements are added, parts are replaced, and different sources begin to merge. Sometimes the original image remains clearly recognisable; sometimes it survives only as a faint memory beneath many layers of transformation. Likewise, perfectly clean digital imagery is often deliberately „contaminated“ with textures and structures from the physical world, making it feel less synthetic and more organic.
The example below illustrates this creative process. It follows a single piece of source material as it evolves into a variety of visual elements within my visual library.
It all began with a short video of dried leaves on the ground. My original intention was simple: to capture an organic texture that could later be layered over cleaner digital imagery. But while experimenting with the footage—moving the texture in different directions, varying its speed, and exploring its rhythm—I found myself inspired to introduce coloured backgrounds and gradually push the material further. What started as a subtle overlay became the starting point for an entirely new visual exploration.
In the early transformations, the leaves remain clearly recognisable. As the process continues, however, they slowly dissolve into abstract structures, shifting patterns, and flowing movements that bear little resemblance to the original recording while still carrying traces of its organic origin.
None of these transformations is intended as a finished artwork. Instead, they become individual fragments of a much larger visual vocabulary—a collection of living elements that can later be layered, blended, and reinterpreted during live performance.
Here I put them them all together in the order of transformation. And in the end there is one example how it could be combined with other material in a live VJ-ing.
The music (by El Cartel) is only an example as well to make your watching more enjoyable.
During a VJ set, dozens or even hundreds of these visual fragments are layered, blended, distorted, and recombined in real time. Which elements appear, how long they remain visible, and how they interact is determined by the music, the atmosphere of the venue, the architecture of the space, and the energy of the dancers.
In that sense, the finished artwork is never the individual image or animation.
The artwork is the live visual improvisation that emerges from them.
