From SFMOMA to Lightrhythm — The San Francisco Years

I moved to San Francisco in 2002, and within a year of arriving I was showing work at Dimension 7, SOMA Arts Gallery, and the Drum Machine Museum. It was one of those periods where everything seemed to converge — the city's digital art scene was thriving, the VJ movement was gaining serious traction, and there was a genuine appetite for work that blurred the boundaries between motion graphics, fine art, and live performance.

The Scene

San Francisco in the early 2000s was uniquely positioned for the kind of work I was making. The tech industry provided the tools — early motion graphics software, real-time visual processing, affordable projection — while the city's deep countercultural tradition provided the audience and the spaces. Club nights, gallery openings, warehouse events, and museum screenings all fed into the same ecosystem.

The SFMOMA screening was part of a programme called From Within, which positioned audiovisual art within the context of a major contemporary art museum. Showing at SFMOMA at 24 years old, in a city I'd only just moved to, set the tone for what followed.

Founding Lightrhythm

In 2003, I co-founded Lightrhythm Visuals with Jon Schwark. We started the label because we wanted to publish our own work and realised there was no real outlet for VJ and audiovisual content at the time. What began as a practical solution to a distribution problem became something much larger — an international platform that connected artists across five continents.

Over ten years, Lightrhythm published more than 240 films by over 70 artists. We produced a series of DVDs distributed through Microcinema International, wrote for several publications, and hosted regular screening and performance events across the US, Japan, and Europe. The label became a curatorial project as much as a publishing one — each release was an opportunity to map the global VJ community and to argue, through the work itself, that this was a legitimate art form deserving of serious attention.

https://vimeo.com/546921087

What It Built

The San Francisco years — and the decade of Lightrhythm that followed — built the infrastructure for everything in my practice now. The comfort with projection at architectural scale comes from those early warehouse shows. The international network comes from a decade of publishing artists from Tokyo to Moscow to Sao Paulo. The understanding of how moving image occupies space — how it wraps around a viewer, how it creates environment rather than just spectacle — comes from thousands of hours projecting in clubs, galleries, and festival stages.

When I project Polyglot across the walls of P3 Ambika, or map Archetype onto a building facade, I'm drawing on skills and instincts that were formed in San Francisco twenty years ago. The medium has changed — from VJ loops to generative typographic systems — but the spatial intelligence remains the same.