On the Road: Live Design International

Last week, I was invited by to participate in a panel discussion at Live Design International (LDI) in Las Vegas, the leading conference and trade show for lighting and live design professionals. The panel was called “Design On A Dime”, and despite the name, tended to mainly focus around how people create one-off and custom show designs. Those of you mostly focussed on music might not realize how many theater and stage professionals are sticking Max in the middle of their complex show designs. Joining me on the panel were other artists and lighting designers working with Isadora, Millumin, and Lightjams, as well as a number of other solutions.

A big topic of conversation - and something I realized I wanted to learn more about - was LED pixel mapping. With individually addressable LED strips and tapes now widely available and relatively affordable, lots of people are looking into custom installations and set pieces that include LED lighting effects. Enttec’s E.L.M. software includes supports for Syphon, which means you could develop video effects in Jitter that get passed along to the LEDs without having to do the DMX programming yourself. Some very exciting possibilities there that I’ll be excited to test out in my studio.

Besides that, where LDI really delivers is a show floor full of fog machines, laser projectors, movable head lighting fixtures, projection mapping, and every configuration of LED lights you can imagine. It definitely made me want to dust off Andrew Pask’s DMX articles and dive into some lighting experiments.