Hi! My name is Joëlle, I'm an audio­visual artist and designer living in London. I was raised in Cape Town, South Africa and spent the first year after school study­ing what was called "multi­media design" at the time. This was where I first encoun­tered Flash and where I was intro­duced to a whole new world of inter­active media and creativity.

Music has always had an important presence in my life, and as I de­vel­oped my design skills I became interested in cre­at­ing videos and visu­als for music. I didn't like a lot of the visuals I would see at par­ties, which often felt dis­con­nected from the audio, noisy and too colour­ful. I started cre­at­ing visuals for my partner Eaton who did a club night every month in Cape Town. This was in the form of pre-rendered videos, and despite my best efforts to design for the music, I dis­liked how there was no con­nection to the fre­quen­cies - that they were not audio reactive.

An important moment was when I dis­cov­ered a plugin for After Effects called Trap­code Form that does audio analy­sis. I made some videos for Eaton's Drum & Bass label using Form and this became my first expe­rience of using sound as an input to drive animation. I remem­ber being com­plete­ly blown away by how you could link dif­fer­ent para­meters to fre­quen­cies - suddenly I had a way to connect the audio and visual in a more auto­mated and precise way, and I was hooked.

For a long time I worked on per­son­al video pro­jects in the after hours, devel­oping my skills and com­bin­ing my love of music and design. The first few years of my design career were spent work­ing in ad­ver­tising doing a lot of meaning­less and mind numb­ing work - and express­ing myself through sound and visual became a form of ther­apy for me, a creative outlet and a way of es­cap­ing the monotony of my day job.

Over time I found myself feeling more and more frus­trat­ed with my work­flow, as it involved a lot of waiting and none of the output was instant. I felt like the soft­ware I was using was limiting my creative flow and I didn't feel very agile in the way that I was working. I wanted to use a live audio input and make visuals that reacted in real­time to the audio. I also liked the idea of im­pro­vi­sa­tion and live per­for­mance, being able to react and respond to what you're hearing in the moment rather than it being predefined.

Shortly after moving to London a friend has lent me a book called "Processing: A Pro­gram­ming Hand­book for Visual Designers and Artists" by Casey Reas. This is how I dis­covered creative coding and a whole new dimen­sion and work­flow. I found being able to iterate quick­ly without having to RAM pre­view or render extreme­ly liber­ating. Working with live audio and coding ani­mations pre­sented a whole new way of creating which was less restricting and faster. No more timelines or keyframes!

I started with Pro­cess­ing but I real­ly found my flow when I dis­cov­ered the visual pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment Quartz Com­pos­er. Con­necting nodes together was a lot more intu­itive to me than looking at lines of code, I didn't need to compile any­thing to see any changes and it inte­grated with 2V-P and VDMX which are live per­for­mance tools that enable you to mix com­positions together and control them easily via MIDI. At the start of 2020 I made the switch from Quartz Com­poser to Vuo. Vuo has a lot of the things I liked about QC but it's more power­ful, well designed and it has a great team behind it who work closely with the community to develop new features.

I think there are parallels for sure. As a pro­duct design­er I'm think­ing about who's using the product and how my designs can help people achieve what they need to do in the most intu­itive way, within a set of con­straints. With my audio­visual work I'm think­ing about the audi­ence and the atmos­phere that I want to create, and how my vi­su­als can comple­ment and maybe even deepen their experience of the music.

Both require an awareness of the end user as well as team­work and collab­o­ration. The contrast is in the approach. Creating visuals is a very serendip­i­tous and exploratory pro­cess for me, where­as I operate in a more sys­tem­atic way when I'm working on digital products. When I'm design­ing visuals, I tend to exer­cise a lot of restraint. I think this instinct comes from my design back­ground - where I've been trained to vali­date every design detail and ensure that each component or element on a page has purpose.

Balancing the two worlds of day and night can be quite re­lent­less and I have to be good with time mana­ge­ment. At the moment I'm free­lanc­ing as a product designer at a studio called ustwo in London who are brilliant and in­spir­ing in their own right. Evenings and week­ends and some­times early mornings are when I develop and work on audio­visual projects.

The music is always the starting point for any project and the main source of inspiration. There's an initial phase where I'm absorbing the audio and essen­tially throwing paint at a wall, exploring different tech­niques and exper­i­ment­ing. Tools like Vuo enable this sort of iterative work­flow - where you don't know your desti­na­tion but you uncover and discover the path as you go along.

The toolset is pretty much the same, whether it's a music video or real-time or a live performance. I use Vuo to create the visuals, and often I load the Vuo comps into VDMX so I can mix com­po­si­tions together or add effects to them. I use Lemur for iPad as a touch con­troller so typ­i­cally I'll have a bunch of para­me­ters and effects that are MIDI mapped to sliders and buttons in Lemur and VDMX so I can manip­ulate and control what the visuals are doing in real-time. This is alongside the more auto­mated audio reactive elements that are pro­grammed to run on their own based on the frequencies coming in.

If the final output is video, I'll cap­ture the VDMX or Vuo output with my Blackmagic Video Assist and edit these screen record­ings of the live visuals in Premiere.

Ali Demirel's work with Richie Hawtin, espe­cial­ly the first Plastikman live show, was hugely influ­en­tial. His minimal aes­thetic and slowly devel­op­ing visuals was very unusual to me at the time, he told a story in a subtle and mes­meris­ing way that am­pli­fied the music visually.

Joshua Davis was and still is a big influ­ence. He was the first person I dis­cov­ered who used code to create images and anima­tion. His pro­cess and the way that he works really resonates and I've learnt a lot from him. He's also the most gen­er­ous when it comes to sharing know­ledge and he's en­cour­aged and moti­va­ted me to trust and believe in myself.

The connection we have when we listen to music, the col­lec­tive ritual of dance, those moments on the dance­floor that tran­scend time and real­ity are what drives me to create the work that I do. I have so many mem­o­ries through these shared expe­ri­ences. I long for these mo­ments that we've not been able to expe­ri­ence for almost a year now.

A very special project is my con­tri­bu­tion to Christoph Grünberger's new book The Age of Data, which explores the data-driven art and design pro­jects of 40 artists, de­signers and studios. I met Christoph for the first time at TOCA ME in 2020 and we in­stant­ly connected over our love of elec­tronic music and mini­mal aes­thet­ic. This book is a beauti­ful insight into the tools and tech­niques used across a wide range of fields and medi­ums. I'm super grate­ful to TOCA ME for inviting me and enabling this en­counter that led to such an amazing oppor­tunity.

My collaboration with Joshua Davis at OFFF Festival a few years ago was a huge honour and also the begin­ning of our friend­ship. I have so much respect and love for that man. His work is incred­ible and his support has been crucial to my de­vel­op­ment as an artist. We in­stant­ly under­stood each other and I look for­ward to more future col­lab­o­ra­tions!

The various projects I've done with FOLD have also been some of my favourite col­lab­o­ra­tions that have been equally impor­tant for my per­son­al de­vel­op­ment. As a venue that is a club but also an art and studio space, they under­stand visual art and how it can ampli­fy the ex­peri­ence of lis­ten­ing to music. A recent project with them was a video for the track "Saturn Storm" off the first FOLD Records release - the Common Assault EP.