The productions that defined the form of modern concert visuals

Each entry here records three things: what the production was, the technical problem it set out to answer, and which discipline carried the weight. They are documented from published material.

Two threads run through the whole set. The first is depth, the repeated finding that separating a picture physically beats increasing its resolution, which appears first in the stacked-plane designs and reappears years later in volumetric LED. The second is packing: a surprising share of what reads as aesthetic choice turns out, on inspection, to be a decision about what fits in a truck and assembles the same way every night.

Why 2014 to 2017 is the interesting window

The problems these productions were actually solving

Depth on a flat surface. An LED wall is a plane, and a plane cannot be made deep by adding pixels to it. Two of the entries here solve that physically instead: stacked translucent planes in 2014, and an array resolving true volume in 2017. The technique is documented under LED and volumetric.

Surfaces that will not hold still. A cube that rotates, a scenic piece that tracks, a building that was never meant to be a screen. The cube and the Opera House sit at opposite ends of the same discipline (one moves and is small, the other is enormous and listed) and both are projection mapping problems before they are anything else.

Rooms that fight the picture. A fixed acoustic shell reflects, frames and constrains everything placed in front of it, and an open desert field removes the surfaces a designer normally leans on while adding daylight. Neither is a content problem. Both are questions about where anything can physically stand.

Surviving a routing. Three consecutive arena runs is a different discipline from a one-off: what carries over between them is a visual language and a set of parts that assemble identically in a different building every night. A performance installation and a single release night are the opposite case, built once, for one room, with the constraints of touring removed.

How to read an entry

Each page states what is documented and what is not. Where the published record is thin the page says so rather than filling the gap, and where a figure is contested both versions appear. Nothing here reconstructs a rig from a photograph: a cable count that cannot be sourced is not reported.

The productions are credited to the people the published record credits. Where a designer, studio or production company is named, it is because a source names them in that role. How the writing here is sourced is set out on about this site.

Where the technique is explained

These pages record what happened. The disciplines that made it possible are documented separately, because the same technique recurs across several productions and belongs in one place: stage and scenic design covers the half decided before anyone runs anything, and real-time and VJ craft the half that happens under a clock. The software involved is under the toolchain, including the alignment tools that most of the mapped entries depend on and the pixel-pitch arithmetic behind every wall specification here. Terms are defined once in the glossary, and contemporaneous coverage is collected under the field in print.