Ask ten VJs what they run and you will get ten answers, but a handful of programs show up again and again in our workshops. Here is the short version of the toolkit that powered a decade of live visuals.

Resolume Avenue

The workhorse. Clip-based, fast and forgiving, Resolume is where most people start and many people stay. We ran Resolume sessions repeatedly, including the 2010 programme, because it maps neatly onto how a VJ actually thinks: banks of clips, triggered live.

Modul8 and Arkaos VJ

Modul8 (Mac) and Arkaos VJ were the other two pillars of the club era, both covered in sessions going back to the 2009 and 2008 workshops. Layer-based and performance-first, they shaped how a generation mixed video to music.

Quartz Composer

For the generative crowd, Quartz Composer opened the door to realtime, reactive visuals built from scratch. It is more patch-and-wire than clip-and-trigger, and it rewarded the tinkerers.

The point was never the brand of software. See what the video artists built with it, whatever they ran.