Can you tell us a little bit about your history in the industry?
It started with games, not with music. As a 17-year-old gamer I traded server management for free internet with a telecom provider, and that led – via a game I built for the legendary Antwerp club Zillion – straight into nightlife. I had never set foot in a club before that. I became a VJ, first at the Versuz nightclub, and in 2005 I founded Prismax and toured the world doing visuals for DJs. Somewhere along the way I met Ruben Gorissen, our CTO and my business partner, in that same VJ circuit. The real turning point was the pandemic: we proposed to Tomorrowland to build the festival virtually in Unreal Engine – four months of beautiful nightmare. That project changed everything, because it’s where our real-time technology was born. It grew into xLive, the platform that now drives our work from the Tomorrowland mainstage to the Sphere in Las Vegas. Twenty years in, I still feel like that gamer – we’ve just kept scaling up the game.
How did you first approach the theme “Consciencia”? How did the brief go from concept to fruition?
The brief never arrives as a technical document – it arrives as a feeling. Tomorrowland’s creative team built the world of Consciencia around the primary emotions of human experience, embodied in the six monumental faces of the mainstage, and our first conversations were about exactly that: what does each emotion feel like, and how does an audience travel through them? From there, we developed a visual universe per emotion – each with its own landscapes, its own colour language, its own rhythm – all designed on the exact geometry of the set, so that steel and pixels read as a single image. Then come months of iteration between their team and ours, sketches becoming worlds, worlds becoming shows. And the final step happens on the hill itself: because everything runs live, the emotional journey isn’t a fixed film – it’s performed every show, following the music.
How is it to have been involved in Tomorrowland since its inception? How do you feel the festival and Prismax’s collaboration with Tomorrowland has grown since then?
Tomorrowland and Prismax are literally the same age – the first edition of the festival and the founding of our studio both date from 2005 – and we’ve grown up side by side. In the early years it was VJ work; today we design and perform the complete video layer of the festival’s stages, we built the virtual edition of Tomorrowland during the pandemic, and we took the Unity show to the Sphere in Las Vegas together. The collaboration has become structural too: We Are One World, the company above Tomorrowland, stepped into Prismax’s capital last year. But the real growth is trust. After two decades they involve us at the very beginning of the creative process instead of at the end – and that’s exactly when the best work happens.
Can you tell us more about Prismax’s technology and how it responds to each artist live? How did this impact Tomorrowland directly?
Traditional stage visuals are pre-rendered: batteries of computers calculate every frame weeks in advance, and once rendered, the content is frozen. xLive turns that logic on its head. It’s built on the Unreal game engine, so the worlds on the screens are computed in real time during the show – which means our operators perform the visuals live, like an instrument. We can push the intensity, launch a new sequence on the beat, and follow wherever an artist takes a set. I sometimes describe it as playing a computer game at an unseen scale. When something bigger needs to change, we briefly take the server cluster offline, adapt the 3D scene, resync, and see the result live instantly – where a classic re-render would cost days. For Tomorrowland, the direct impact is creative freedom: the show breathes with each artist instead of running past them, and ideas stay possible right up to showtime. And it keeps evolving – the next generation of xLive is about making that power intuitive: easy to learn, difficult to master.
Did this year’s edition pose any challenges, if yes, how did you overcome them?
The biggest one blew in with the weather. Because of the extreme drought, fireworks and pyrotechnics were banned for weekend 1 – a serious blow for a show built on big climaxes. Instead of dropping those moments, we moved them to the screens: we created digital fireworks and performed them live. Seeing a full hill react to fireworks made of pixels was the best possible proof of why we built our technology to be flexible in the moment. By weekend 2, limited pyrotechnics were allowed again, and the real and the digital could reinforce each other.
Do you have highlights of your involvement in the 2026 edition of Tomorrowland?
The digital fireworks of weekend 1 are the obvious one. But the highlight that stays with me is what we heard afterwards: people told us this was the best edition until now. When you’ve been part of something for twenty years, hearing that never becomes routine. And on a personal level, it remains the act of performing itself: standing with the team in the middle of that hill, playing the visuals live while a hundred thousand people travel through the emotions of Consciencia with you.
