Vello Virkhaus Dreams in LED

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If you've attended any major music festival, chances are you've witnessed the brain-twisting visuals of Vello Virkhaus and his crew at V-Squared labs. Simply put, these guys are the most talented and boundary-pushing VJs in existence. But let's back up for a hot second. What is a VJ, you ask? Imagine you're in the crowd at the Main Stage of Ultra witnessing a high-energy set from Laidback Luke. Behind the booth is a mammoth LED wall with more voltage than your local power plant. Mind-bending shapes flow seamlessly, constantly evolving, changing and morphing as the music ebbs and flows throughout the set. Guess what? Someone is actually controlling and triggering the various visuals in real time. That person is the VJ.

I recently spoke with Virkaus, the CEO and visual mastermind behind V-Squared labs, who's done visuals for everyone from Tiësto to Datsik, and incorporated advanced methods of 3D mapping in Amon Tobin and Infected Mushroom sets and stage production. This year, nearly all of Ultra Music Festival's visual production will run through V-Sqaured's custom software. Next time you think DJ visuals are on some sort of iTunes visualizer autopilot—think again

THUMP: When you were growing up, VJing was a pretty different industry than it is today, mainly due to the huge innovations in technology. What originally sparked your interest in the field?
Vello Virkhaus: Well, I've always been interested in art and have been influenced by a lot of different painters. My grandfather was a gallery owner and a painter so I had a strong start in fine art, which kind of lead into my interest in video. I inherited his VHS camera and got into making video feedback experiments. I volunteered doing video for cable access before college.

I got into 3D animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That's the place I really got interested in animation and realized I could have a career in the field. While most of my classmates would end up moving out to LA to do animation at places like Pixar and Digital Domain, I ended up staying in Chicago and doing post-production.

How did you get started doing animations for live music?
A girl who worked in the camera check-out department of the Art Institute said I had to meet this artist who would later go on to become my partner. He was doing a lot of the same crazy, rapid motion video that I was doing. We set up an installation at a street festival and played some really weird video. We were approached by some promoters from the Drop Bass network in Milwaukee who became our first real dance music clients. This was the time when people were just starting to hear about acts like Daft Punk in that area.

We became part of some electronic music events in the Midwest, formed a company called Optical Video Technicians (OVT) and started doing a lot of raves in my partner's huge loft space. We started gathering huge quantities of film projectors and at one point inherited the medical film library on 16mm reels from the University of Illinois Chicago. It was like 1,000 reels of the strangest stuff from surgeries and other medical procedures. We freaked out a lot of people in Chicago.

Where do you find inspiration for your visuals?
I used to shoot a ton of video and everything used to be video-based or sample-based. Eventually I shifted my flow to something pure instead of based on acquisition or processing. Because of the sheer quantity and size of the DJ scene now, you can really curate content more and choose to work with what you like from numerous different sites. At this point, performance-wise, I'm really influenced by the massive availability of media and selecting things that I enjoy, or that could be a good source to layer together with other types of media. I really get inspired by seeing it come to life—just being in the moment and seeing the whole space witnessing something transform. When the video, music and environment all come together as one it's really magical and that's what I've always loved the most.

Who are your favorite artists to work with right now?
I've really been enjoying all of our collaborations with the Datsik and Krewella teams. We're working on some great things with Coachella coming up. I love working with all the EDM guys and they've been some of the friendliest clients we've ever had. They're such inspired artists to work with.

So you have Ultra coming up this weekend. What are some of your favorite parts about VJing there?
My favorite part of Ultra is the grand scale of it all. It almost makes you a little tingly inside when you absorb the whole scope of it. I enjoy the challenge of it and, more then ever, this year we're almost the systems engineers of the Main Stage video. We booked the VJ talent for all of the stages and are helping to coordinate all of that. We're providing our technology to process and map the main-stage video, so all of the artists coming with their VJs will be routing through our system. I'm actually only going to be VJing for a couple hours during the daytime this year. After that I'll be going back to my hotel to take it easy and just let my technology work for me

Any tricks up your sleeve for Miami this year?
Yeah, we've definitely made some improvements since last year. The real trick will actually not be at Ultra, but at Adore nightclub when it opens. We have LED and surfaces that will be amazing. We've been working with Steve Lieberman, the production designer for Ultra, who designed the whole club. It's got all of our new modules, pre-set systems and synthesizers. It will be wonderful.

Any highlight stories from VJing Ultra over the years?
Oh man, yeah. I love VJing for Laidback Luke. He does some great scratching. He bounces around, drops some hard-house and kind of has a tiny flavor of Bad Boy Bill. Some of the most epic visual sets I've done over the years have been for Fedde LeGrand too. I gave myself goose bumps [laughs].

If you could VJ for one artist, living or dead, who would it be?
Gosh that's such a tough question. I would say Lou Reed, but he's gone now. It would be totally different then any of the EDM stuff. The whole EDM thing can be really cold sometimes—and kind of geometric. It can feel like somewhat of an assault. I've VJ'd for almost everyone in EDM over the last 15 years, so there's not really anyone I can say that I'm still dying to VJ for. If I could have done something for the Velvet Underground or David Bowie that would just blow my mind.
@DLGarber