About this live visuals reference, its editorial remit, and the timeboyticktock.com domain

What this live visuals reference covers

How this live visuals reference is written and sourced is set out below, section by section. What it is, in one line: a live visuals reference for people who build the picture rather than watch it.

TICK TOCK VISUALS documents the trade behind the picture at a live show: the design work that decides what surfaces exist, the technique that gets an image onto them, and the practice of running that image in real time against music. It covers stage and scenic design, real-time content and VJ craft, the software toolchain, and a set of productions chosen because each solved a technical problem whose solution is still in use.

It exists because the field is documented badly. Live visuals are ephemeral by nature; the work runs for two hours and survives mostly as footage shot for other purposes. Credits are buried, because visual designers are rarely billed alongside the acts they work for. The result is a discipline with a substantial body of practice and a thin written record, a gap discussed further under the field in print.

John King, Timeboy, and the work that was on timeboyticktock.com

timeboyticktock.com was the portfolio site of John King, the Los Angeles visual artist, composer and VJ who works under the name Timeboy. Working frequently with the visual artist Strangeloop, King developed the LAYER3 and Hypercube live shows for Flying Lotus, and his credits across that period include work with Kendrick Lamar, Daedelus, DJ Snake, Tchami, The Weeknd, Erykah Badu, Thundercat and Hiatus Kaiyote. He was a member of the Brainfeeder label and co-founded the AV collective Teaching Machine. His work was covered by Vice, Rolling Stone, Wired, The Guardian and Red Bull Music Academy among others, and he held a visual residency at the Los Angeles experimental music night Low End Theory.

King continues to work in the field. What sits on the domain now is a separate editorial project with different authorship.

How the productions are documented, and from which published sources

Each entry in the productions archive records what the show was, the technical problem it set out to answer, and which discipline carried the weight. The entries are built from published sources and are deliberately conservative: where the record supports a claim, the claim is made; where it does not, the page describes general practice instead of inventing specifics. Where a production is documented, the people who made it are named as the people who made it.

The remit is narrow on purpose. A page is written when the published record carries enough detail to describe how the picture was actually made: which surfaces existed, what drove them, and which department owned the problem. Trade press, manufacturer documentation, conference talks and vendor case studies carry that detail unevenly. A tour may be covered at length for its set list and barely at all for its media server, so an entry is assembled from whichever sources go closest to the technical question and stops where they stop. Figures are given where a source gives them: pixel pitch, panel count, projector output, resolution. Where only the effect is on record and not the method, the page describes what was seen and explains the technique in general terms rather than attributing a specific one.

Two productions that would otherwise qualify are absent on purpose. Work is documented here when there is enough published material to describe it accurately and when doing so does not require speaking for the people who made it. A show whose look is well known and whose build is undocumented cannot be described accurately, and guessing at a rig is less useful than leaving the page unwritten. The glossary and the toolchain pages serve the same standard from the other direction: they define the vocabulary and the software an entry has to use, so a reader who arrives at a production page without a lighting or media background can follow what is being described.

Corrections and editorial standards

How this live visuals reference is written and sourced from published sources matters most at the point where it is wrong. This field’s written record contains errors, and so, inevitably, does this site. If a production is described inaccurately, a credit is wrong, or a technical explanation is misleading, that is worth knowing and it will be fixed. Contact details are here.

The domain

This site is published at timeboyticktock.com. The brand name TICK TOCK VISUALS is not the domain name, which is stated here, in the footer of every page, and in the site’s own metadata so there is no ambiguity about the relationship between the two.