A History of VJing

1960s — The root

Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), 1966: Andy Warhol's monthly multimedia event at the Polski Dom Narodowy (the Dom) in NYC, starting April 1966. Five film projectors, five slide projectors changing every 10 seconds, and lighting innovations by engineer Danny Williams. With the Velvet Underground & Nico performing, it became the template that liquid light shows and raves would extend.
Video art as the backdrop: From the 1960s, Nam June Paik developed modified-TV installations and video art. Not VJing in itself, but the art-side reservoir that later AV artists drew from.

UK rave culture: Late-80s into the 90s, UK acid-house and rave promoters picked up the liquid-light-show tradition. Wall projection, parascopes, and saturated psychedelia blurred into a single visual environment.
Coldcut & Hexstatic — "Timber" (1997): Released on Ninja Tune's Let Us Play!. Sampled Greenpeace logging footage into sync with its music — a landmark piece of AV collage that later made the 1998 Edinburgh TV & Film Festival music-video shortlist. The moment VJing proved itself as sampling-as-art.
Tokyo: Naohiro Ukawa and MANIAC LOVE (1990s): Born in 1968, a DTP graphic designer before meeting EYE of BOREDOMS and turning to VJing in the early 90s. From around 1993 he was a resident VJ at Nishi-Azabu's Atomage (MANIAC LOVE family). Alongside Hyperderelic Video and Princeton (Hideyuki Tanaka + Pierre Taki), Ukawa is one of the central figures of 90s Tokyo club VJ culture.

Resolume / Modul8 / VDMX: Resolume (Netherlands), Modul8 (Garage Cube, Switzerland), and VDMX (VIDVOX, USA) all launched commercial product lines in the 2000s. "Professional VJ software" became a distinct category, with MadMapper (Garage Cube) later joining it as the projection-mapping specialist.
Motion Dive Tokyo (2003): The Japanese VJ tool Motion Dive Tokyo gave casual users a way into PC-based VJing, widening the scene significantly in Japan. The original Motion Dive launched in 1998.
Rhizomatiks founded (2006): Daito Manabe — Tokyo University of Science mathematics + IAMAS — founded Rhizomatiks in 2006. Later he co-led Rhizomatiks Research with Motoi Ishibashi. Credits include Perfume, Björk, Squarepusher, and the Tokyo 2020 pitch at the Rio 2016 closing ceremony. A face of modern Japanese AV.

DOMMUNE launched (2010): Ukawa opened DOMMUNE as Japan's first USTREAM-based live studio on March 1, 2010. Streaming DJ and VJ sets with talk in real time — a format that pre-figured post-COVID live culture by a decade.
Algorave named (2011): Alex McLean (UK, creator of TidalCycles) and Nick Collins coined "Algorave" in 2011. Live-coding music and visuals from scratch moved from research rooms into clubs as an adjacent category to VJing.
Nonotak formed (2011): Paris: Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto paired up in 2011. Immersive light-and-sound installations at Tate Modern, Sónar, MUTEK — a defining act for 2010s international AV.

Hydra (2017): Olivia Jack debuted Hydra at the 2017 International Conference on Live Coding. A WebGL-based VJ environment that runs in the browser, open-source and free. Sharing a URL is enough to perform — a meaningful step for both browser and automated VJing.
AI-driven generative VJ: Refik Anadol Studio (LA, founded 2014) led a rapid expansion of machine-learning-driven visual work in the 2020s, with commissions from Microsoft, Google AMI, and NASA/JPL reaching large permanent installations.
Automated / unattended VJ in venues: Growing need for lower-staff visual operation in bars, lounges, and side floors — combined with mature browser APIs (WebGL 2, Web Audio, music recognition APIs) — opened the door to automated VJ tools like autovj.club.