Music Tech Fest 5th-7th September 2014

Alex May spoke at Music Tech Fest in London on 6 September 2014 about Painting With Light, his bespoke video-mapping software for artists. Held at LSO St Luke’s, the festival brought together artists, performers, researchers, start-ups, labels, inventors, and technologists, making it a strong setting for a talk focused on creative tools rather than finished spectacle.

The presentation framed Painting With Light as a practical artistic system for building projection-mapped works from the ground up. Rather than treating mapping as a polished effect added at the end of a process, May’s approach positioned software as part of how a work is conceived, composed, and performed. In that context, the talk made clear how custom tools can open different visual languages and give artists more direct control over time, space, rhythm, and surface.

That mattered within the wider practice because May’s work repeatedly treats software not as neutral infrastructure but as an expressive medium in itself. Speaking at Music Tech Fest placed that position in front of an audience already thinking across music, design, performance, and technology, and showed how his moving-image practice grows from building the tools as well as the artworks.