VDMX – PROFESSIONAL VJ SOFTWARE

Most of my time professionally is spent working on a piece of software for live visual performance called VDMX at a company called VIDVOX where I'm one of the co-owners. Sometimes we call the field VJing (like a video DJ), or it is sometimes referred to as video instrumentalism.

Above, screenshots of VDMX versions 1-5

I got into this in late 2001 with my friend Olivia Artz. We were studying at RPI and he was invited to do the visuals for a weekly music night at a local bar organized by another student we had recently met. Taking advantage of the excellent school equipment room we had access to all the video mixers, VCRs, cameras, and projectors we needed to get started as VJs. As we reached the limits of what we could do with video hardware the next step was to start using computers, both for preproduction of clips that would be played at shows and for actual live remixing using VJ software we found online.

Among the VJ software we found for the Mac was an amazing video mixer and FX processor called VDMX by an artist named Johnny Dekam. As it happened his office was only a few blocks from the bar that we were taking over every Tuesday night and it was only a matter of time before we met. Liv started interning for him, taking a semester off from school to write an app called Grid. After graduation I joined the team working on the next version of VDMX which was planned to be more modular than previous versions.

Today I continue working on the development of VDMX and several supporting open source projects along with another RPI graduate from our weekly crew, Ray Cutler. Over the years we've been fortunate to have see some pretty amazing musicians and visual artists use our tools for their live show productions on stages big and small.

A lot of the ideas for the future of VDMX comes being actively engaged in the field; sometimes this takes happens by closely helping artists reach their creative visions, and other times putting form to our own ideas for live performance. One of my particular personal interests in this area is creating video feedback FX loops to create abstract images from noise, like in the example on this page.