Aron Altmark is a designer and technical producer of large-scale and touring events. He is also the founder and executive director of Visual Endeavors, which recently became part of Hovercraft Ventures. Altmark has said of the acquisition, “We’ve built our reputation by partnering with the best in the business. Now, as part of Hovercraft Ventures, we have a true home that gives us the shared resources and collaborative engine to innovate experiences, at a scale we’ve always imagined to our current and future clients.”
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Altmark talked to Live Design about his career in live events taking him from Alabama around the country and eventually to creating a space for work, learning, and play in Visual Endeavor's studio in Santa Cruz, CA.
Live Design: What was your career path to your current position and what attracted you to the industry?
Aron Altmark: I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and was drawn to film and production via my photographer father, eventually going to high school at the Alabama School of Fine Arts where I fell in love with lighting and video for theatre and dance. From there I went on a somewhat circuitous journey for college, chasing experience and job possibilities from Orlando, FL to Los Angeles where I interned for A.C.T Lighting (now ACT Entertainment) before ending up in Las Vegas for school and working in nightclubs. I learned so many things about how to use technology in creative ways while in Vegas because I was exposed to an exceptional caliber of gear in clubs, and it was at this time I also met Steve Lieberman. For the next few years, I worked a full-time job at A.C.T in LA helping teach people how to use the grandMA series of lighting consoles and solving support issues, but I yearned to finish my schooling and to be more creative. After doing a guest lecture on the grandMA at CalArts, I went back to school to finish up the degree I'd been working on, going to classes on lighting design and creative coding during the week while doing shows and festivals for SJ Lighting on the weekends and learning about the design of large-scale shows from Steve (whom I still consider one of my biggest mentors). In 2016, I'd gotten my BFA from CalArts in Lighting Design + Digital Media and decided that I was ready to leave LA for somewhere less urban, and a combination of friends and mountain biking led me to Santa Cruz where I've been since. I started Visual Endeavors that year as I started touring with Tiesto, a DJ who was foundational in the trance/techno movement, and from then on VE was all about finding ways to make cool shows and experiences using new technology for audiences of all sizes. The company grew from just me being on the road to having small teams integrating with many large productions and creative teams from corporate to touring to experiential, where we are today.
LD: What does joining Hovercraft Ventures mean for you and for Visual Endeavors?
AA: Joining Hovercraft Ventures is such an exciting opportunity for me as a solo founder in that it opens up capacity for scaling, a wider network of partners and collaborators, and resources for us to expand operations and take on more ambitious projects. Especially when it comes to PixelCannon, our workhorse media server and computing platform, the ability to devote focused resources and deploy PixelCannon on our Hovercraft partners' projects is going to be a game-changer. For me personally, the partnership is going to reinforce our creative identity in that it allows me to build VE while not spending all of my time personally buried in the day-to-day admin of a small creative firm. The immediate addition of a larger (and extremely cool) creative family is quite special, and we're really eager to see what comes in the way of new collaboration opportunities with the other companies in the Hovercraft Ventures umbrella.
LD: What piece of technology do you believe has had the biggest impact on your design work/live design in the last ten years?
AA: My favorite piece of tech and tool that we use the most would have to be the advent of real-time rendering softwares -- Notch, Touchdesigner, Unreal Engine specifically. I remember opening up Quartz Composer for the first time in 2010-11 and plugging in a Kinect to make particle systems that responded to motion, and that innate wonder at the conversation between people and technology is still something that drives my work. The pace that compute has continued to accelerate is super fun in that the highest-level GPUs allow us to create content that runs realtime on canvases previously unheard of, and I'm eager to see this grow.
LD: As a professional, what do you wish you were better at/had the time to work on?
AA: The hardest thing for me is not having time to devote to simply playing and exploring for the sake of creative development. This is the reason I wanted to have a dedicated studio space, and why I was so passionate about putting a bunch of gear into our Santa Cruz studio so that we have an easy, low-barrier and capable space for ideation, R&D, and public art. In our industry, so often we face the polarity of crunch time on site building shows straight into home life, with no access to tech or free time to simply make things for fun. I look to ideas like the Google 80/20 rule which allows employees to carve out 20% of their time for passion projects in the hope that letting people build things just for fun or passion leads to greater developments across the board, and this is what I want the studio to embody/enable.
LD: What does the future hold in terms of technological advances for live events?
AA: I'm really interested in what happens when we can decentralize compute a bit more than it is now, which relies on many factors, but being able to stream both media and viewership across the globe would unlock some really exciting possibilities in live entertainment. For a long time, VR/AR has been the north star for the future of entertainment, but I really feel that putting people in a headset takes away the co-presence and best part of live events -- experiencing
something amazing with other like-minded people. Venues like Sphere definitely solve this problem by creating a large-scale visual canvas that transports the entire audience, but this is very much only for the people in the room at that time and ticket prices make it unreachable for many. I believe there's a world where media can be streamed at low latencies such that we don't have to have a huge stack of media servers at every site, or potentially where mixed reality can help audiences remotely experience the same thing an in-person audience gets to see, closing the gap between spatial and emotional presence.