This article is part of Resident Advisor's technology month, dedicated to coverage at the crossroads of electronic music and future-forward innovation throughout the month of June.

When Folamour first announced his Power To The PPL A/V show last year, he was flooded with confused messages—what is an audiovisual show? A/V or audiovisual is a generic term that deals with something involving both hearing and seeing. "I think many people were like, 'I don't know if I want to come to this because maybe it's going to be a seated gig where we're going to listen to an acoustic performance or something like that,'" he postulates. For the French DJ and producer, the journey to creating his first audiovisual act began years prior; he had always been drawn to painting and theatre, and wanted to infuse another visual dimension into his work at some point. In 2019, when he started playing larger bills, there was a certain pressure that came along with that. "When I started playing after artists like Tame Impala, I felt a bit naked on stage," he says. He realised he wasn't offering the same level of audience engagement compared to a performance rife with coruscating lights and dazzling visuals, so he began work on his own audiovisual show, billed as "fully immersive and interactive."

Now, his Power to the PPL show is selling out venues across the globe, and Folamour has become one of a myriad of artists who are letting visuals take centre stage in their work. Any musician that begins to reach audiences of a certain size will, sooner rather than later, face the question of visual accompaniment. "This is a constant reinvention of something that's been happening for a very long time," reiterates Zak Norman, a British visual artist and longtime Bicep collaborator who operates as Black Box Echo. Only now, due to technological advances, artists are finally at a point where the tools are more accessible, so we're seeing an increase in audiovisual shows. This is fostering the expectation for performances to offer more than just music à la carte. Electronic genres in particular have seen an explosion of visual innovation over the last decade, with big-name artists like Max Cooper and Four Tet popularising the concept of audiovisual shows by offering striking performances that are nothing short of pure spectacle.

"This idea of audiovisual is not in any way a new idea. You can date it back to Wagner and before, if you want," says Norman. The notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk—a "total work of art" combining multiple art forms to create a cohesive whole—was conceptualised by the German composer in the 19th century, seeking to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic aspects of opera. In spite of its historic roots, however, the modern definition of an audiovisual performance remains distinctly unclear.

London-based producer and audiovisual artist Max Cooper compares these indistinctions to the evolution of DJing. "We used to have DJ sets and people would use vinyl and it was very clear what they were doing and how it worked. And then as technology took over, the art of DJing became really unclear—are you using a computer, is it mixing for you or are you still mixing the vinyl?" he says. The same thing then happened with electronic music-specific live shows, and now, with the audiovisual show—a concept which can take so many wildly differing forms, the uncertainty is not entirely surprising.

"The question is not what audiovisual adds, but what was missing [before]" says Pier Schneider, cofounder of 1024 architecture, a Paris-based studio working across architectural design and visual art. In the past, he explains, when rock bands took to the stage, it was easy to see and understand what they were doing. "Freddie Mercury or David Bowie didn't need a visual behind them to create a show. But the problem with electronic musicians is that there's not a lot happening on stage. It was kind of boring. So the visual show came in."

For an artist delving into visual work for the first time, the key is authenticity. But how does one even begin to create "authentic" visuals? Folamour recommends starting out with something simple that expresses your values; his act interweaves colourful floral imagery with messages of love and positivity. "It looks exactly like how I am, I think, in my music," he laughs. Unlike some audiovisual shows, where every aspect is pre-synced, his sets are still 100% improvised. The messages which appear on screen during the audiovisual show are chosen by him in the moment via an iPad, retaining all the instantaneity expected from a live performance.

In Cooper's case, he often starts his creative process with the visual ideas, before working on the music. He says it helps to push him in new directions, musically, as well as helping to structure his work. Aside from being a really useful creative tool, it has also made the process more enjoyable, and opened up a new world of collaborations. When working on Emergence in 2013, he began by creating a visual story, which he then used to write the music, eventually leading to a live show and album of the same name. Each chapter of the story is a collaboration with a different visual artist, mathematician, or scientist. For the final piece of the project, he worked with Dolby, applying their tools to music to yield a three-dimensional Atmos soundscape.

Cross-collaboration is at the crux of a vast majority of audiovisual performances. Anna Diaz, cofounder of Hamill Industries, states that the fluid dynamics, audio composition, and light engineering involved with these shows can be so complex that the preparation process naturally involves a gathering of experts. They have a long-standing collaboration with Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points, having teamed up for music videos as well as live laser and visual work. Unlike some audiovisual artists who focus almost entirely on the digital aspect of their practice, Hamill Industries take a highly exploratory perspective to their work, often involving the materiality of objects, with a basis in science and experimental art. "We have never done two projects that have the same workflow, ever," Anna adds. "In one we work with lasers, in another we might work with sound waves or electricity. Obviously we figure out some of the things that we want to do ourselves, but we always have a place for collaborative participation."

Above all, audiovisual shows need to establish some form of a clear connection between the music and the visuals created, be it literal (for example, with the use of projection mapping or audio reactive technology) or purely thematic. When 1024 architecture began work on a project for Étienne de Crécy back in 2007, he had already finalised the music, so their task was to take the sound and translate it into visual patterns. Étienne's music was minimal and binary, so they wanted a classic geometrical form that would reflect that. They eventually settled on a cube, creating a 6x6m scaffolding structure covered by nets. They then made specific visuals for each sound pattern, as well as developing a special mapping software to create a connection between the cube, the music, and the visuals—and thus 'Square Cube' was born.

When that connection between the different aspects isn't there, Norman says, the work suffers. "I tend to encourage people away from [audiovisual], unless there's a reason to do it. Doing it for the sake of it I don't think leads to particularly holistic work. It doesn't feel connected with the artist's personality." He is highlighting an important issue: as the technology used to make these shows becomes more readily available, the amount of knowledge needed in order to do it properly becomes more commodified. "Whilst it's good that technology is being democratised and that you don't need to be from a certain background to have had the privilege to be able to use it for years, the downside is the point at which stuff becomes acceptable is lower," he clarifies. As a result, you end up with a lot of work which looks quite similar, and some that feels downright superfluous. Norman notes that the audiovisual market is becoming arguably too flooded, and that as an artist, you can actually make a more interesting point by not engaging with it. Further down the line, if you want your show to stand out, you might be better off doing it in pitch black.

"For me, it's quite difficult to go to a club and see that they have lots of visuals that are not adding anything. It's just like noise," Diaz agrees. She laments the fact that sometimes there is an unnecessary overproduction of stimuli, but equally underscores the immense capacity of audiovisual elements to give us information about the music throughout all the senses. "What's interesting is to find that sweet spot in which you allow the music to flow and to be experienced as music" whilst adding to the experience in other ways, she adds.

Some settings, and some types of music, are inherently better suited to not having any visuals. If Cooper is playing in a smaller club like Phonox or Corsica Studios, he wouldn't want to do an audiovisual show because that's not the sort of clubs they are. "In those sorts of environments, I like it when it's really dark and smoky and has a really, I don't know, ominous intensity about it. Whenever it's seven in the morning and it's slamming techno music, it just works really nicely in that context."

His experience playing at the Acropolis in Athens and projecting all over the monument, however, is the antithesis to this. These performances are often more stressful given the lack of existing infrastructure to set up an audiovisual show, but the historic architecture lends itself to a bespoke process. He specs every venue uniquely for each performance, trying to make the experience of being in the space as natural as possible. "When you're working with really big spaces with high roofs, where the architecture is already really beautiful, then people are going to be looking at that stuff anyway. So that's when I should be using this as a canvas because it's part of the show already," he explains. If he removed the visual aspect, he says, then "half of what makes the show good would be taken away."

When Diaz's studio created the visuals for Floating Points' Crush audiovisual live show, based on a video game console from the 1980s, they fed audio signals into a machine learning processor. At the beginning, trying to figure out which sounds would translate well into visuals in this oscilloscope was both messy and unpredictable. "Sometimes we had to do that live because everything was audio reactive," she says. "As we kept doing Crush with that technology, we came to realise that watching things happen between [Sam] and this console was visually beautiful. It added a layer of live experimentation that actually became the most interesting thing in the whole project." Dealing with a lack of control, and learning how to build this into their workflow, has actually led the team to having more compelling creative outcomes.

At times, the biggest shortcoming of an audiovisual show is when it ends up being too elaborate for its own good, and loses its human touch. "You can build a show that does some really intelligent things and relies on all these mad algorithms to do it, but in the process of shouting about how clever they are, it's kind of lost its soul a little bit," Norman says. He recounts that, as a younger artist, that was what he wanted to do, but with time, he began to realise that that isn't what the show is about. "In that moment, you don't want people to be wondering how clever the tech was. You want them to be feeling something, something deeper. I want to see work that makes me feel more things as opposed to think more things," Norman explains. There will be newer technology and faster generative visuals, but as he puts it, "if it doesn't say something about who we are, it will always have a coldness to it—for better or worse."