Isle of Summer '26.

Enough enclosed backstage volume to run a festival stage. A structure open enough not to fight the volumetric LED system suspended in its upper section. And a monumental presence for the daytime hours — the festival runs from 11:00, so the stage spends half its life in full daylight, unlit.

A fourth demand sat underneath: one system had to drive every surface on the stage — and host the visual setups of touring headliners on top.

The stage was built as a Layher lattice of cubic cells, an LED module set into each cell of its upper section — a 7 × 7 × 5 array forming a single three-dimensional media volume above the performers. By day the lattice reads as a monument; by night the structure dissolves and the volume takes over.

The volumetric matrix, the main screen above the backstage and the tower screens flanking the structure all run as one system, from one operator seat, on one engine. The construction was developed with the build contractor to meet the safety criteria without giving up the airiness the design depends on.

A 20 × 20 m enclosed backstage sits inside the 32 × 20 × 20 m lattice. The same cells that give the structure its daytime silhouette carry the LED modules that dematerialize it after dark. Safety engineering was worked through with the build contractor from the first drawings.

At the core is the 7 × 7 × 5 LED matrix — 245 cells forming a single volumetric media surface. Content for it is not mapped onto the volume; it is generated inside it. For this project the engine introduced Texture 3D generation, so visual processes run natively in three dimensions within the cube.

MØRPH, ØJE's own generative engine — eight years of continuous development behind it, rebuilt inside the studio into its current architecture: engine separated from UI, adaptive interface, performance tuned for live operation. It simultaneously drove the volumetric cube, the main screen and the tower screens while transmitting DMX to grandMA3 for the strobes and LED tubes framing the structure.

The architecture is modular by design. New components load straight from disk: anything dropped into a designated directory is detected and integrated into both engine and UI automatically, so the system grows with new generators and tools without touching its core.

The stack combines 2D and 3D content generation, processing, FX and parameter control. Any surface can receive the same generation or run its own with independent processing; external feeds enter through capture input, routable to any display; and an incoming video stream can be converted into a volumetric data set by buffering sequential frames and sampling them along a spatial axis.

A beat-tracking module analyzes incoming audio and generates parameters mappable to any variable in the engine, with manual tempo input for live control. The same parameter space reaches the lighting rig: color values and behavioral parameters generated by the visual system went to grandMA3 over DMX for the tubes and strobes. The visual engine conducted the light.

For the festival the system served as the primary content engine for all surfaces and as a VJ instrument for live control of the stage environment. Touring headliners' visual setups — Eric Prydz and Hugel — were connected and synced through the ØJE server the evening before the show, their feeds routed into the system via capture input. The handover is part of the engine itself: transitions between any guest VJ's setup and the stage's own program run inside TouchDesigner — no cut, no black, one canvas.

Everything ran with a backup path and instant switchover; a failure or a handover never reaches the canvas. The lighting rig ran under ØJE's own lighting designer on grandMA3, locked to the same visual logic the engine was driving.

The signal doctrine matched the studio's standard: 8K pixel-perfect output from the server, native connection to the LED processors, no converters or scalers in the path, everything locked to 60 Hz. A dedicated Resolume lane handled backup alongside the real-time engine.

ØJE supervision ran across every vendor on site from day one of the build — structure, LED, rigging, power — with the studio's technical supervisor embedded in the process rather than arriving for handover. 4 build days on site.