From Tomorrowland's larger-than-life stages to the immersive spectacle of Sphere, Prismax's Joris Corthout is helping redefine what it means to experience live music.

There is a moment at every great live show when the boundary between reality and imagination seems to disappear.

The music builds, the lights shift, and suddenly, the stage becomes something else entirely. A frozen landscape. A floating city. An underwater universe. For the thousands of people standing in the crowd, it can feel like magic. For Joris Corthout and his team at Prismax, it is the result of months of creative work, technological experimentation and a remarkable amount of live improvisation.

I sat down with Joris Corthout (CEO/Owner of Prismax), the creative force behind some of the world's most ambitious live visual experiences, to talk about the worlds we see on stage, the ones we never realise are being created in real time, and where the future of live entertainment might take us next.

For Corthout, the ultimate achievement isn't simply creating something spectacular. It's making audiences question what they're actually looking at.

"People are standing in front of the stage and they have no idea that they're looking at a screen," he explains. "They think they're looking at the sky."

At Tomorrowland, where entire fantasy worlds are built around a different creative vision each year, that illusion is everything. Prismax works closely with the festival's stage designers, using the same visual elements to extend the physical architecture into digital environments. Sometimes, even the colour of the virtual sky is matched to the real one.

What makes the process even more fascinating is that much of what audiences see isn't a conventional video playing in the background.

Using its proprietary xLive technology, powered by Unreal Engine, Prismax creates three-dimensional environments that can be manipulated throughout a performance. The worlds are designed in advance, but the actual show unfolds live, responding to the music, lighting and energy of the moment.

"We have no idea, no clue what these artists are going to play," Corthout says.

An operator controls the visuals in real time, while information from lighting and laser systems allows the digital world to respond instantly to what's happening on stage.

There is something almost beautifully old-fashioned about that philosophy. In an industry increasingly fascinated by automation, Corthout still believes in the spontaneity of live performance.

And spontaneity, inevitably, comes with the occasional mistake.

He recalls moments when fireworks went off at the wrong time because a DJ unexpectedly changed tracks. But rather than seeing those incidents as disasters, he considers them part of the unpredictability of creating something live.

After all, most of the audience will never know anything went wrong.

That ability to adapt was tested on an entirely different scale when a fire destroyed Tomorrowland's main stage shortly before the festival opened in 2025.

With little more than 36 hours to prepare an alternative visual setup, Prismax and its network of collaborators had to respond almost immediately.

For a company accustomed to spending months building intricate digital worlds, the experience demonstrated something equally important: creativity is sometimes about finding solutions when there is almost no time to think.

Tomorrowland remains central to Prismax's story, and that relationship extends well beyond Belgium.

At Ushuaïa Ibiza, the company has helped bring the festival's Planaxis universe to life. Inspired by Tomorrowland's underwater world, the stage transforms the open-air venue into an oceanic environment, complete with an enormous turtle suspended above the crowd.

Yet the experience is never entirely the same from one week to the next.

"That's the beauty of an xLive project: it's never finished," Corthout explains in a follow-up exchange. "Because everything runs in real time, we can keep improving the show throughout the season."

Rather than repeating an identical production every time, the team continues refining its visuals, introducing new moments and adapting the experience as the residency progresses.

The same underwater universe is now finding its way back to Tomorrowland's China edition, where Prismax faces the challenge of translating Planaxis into a completely different stage environment.

Because the digital world already exists within Unreal Engine, it can be adapted to a new screen configuration without having to rebuild everything from the beginning.

It's a fascinating example of how a creative concept can travel across continents while retaining its identity.

Thailand represents another chapter in that international expansion. While the setting and audience will inevitably be different, Corthout believes Tomorrowland's defining characteristics remain consistent wherever the festival goes.

"The same DNA, the same vibe is there," he says. "The level of quality is the same in every continent."

That ability to create an instantly recognisable universe has become one of Tomorrowland's greatest strengths. Unlike artists who arrive with their own individual visual productions, DJs performing on its main stage become part of a larger creative vision.

Elsewhere, however, the relationship between music and visuals is becoming increasingly artist-driven.

Corthout points to Anyma as a particularly influential example. Although Prismax doesn't work with the artist, he credits his immersive performances with changing expectations across the electronic music industry.

"You don't want to know how many DJs call me and they say, 'I want to have a show like Anyma,'" he laughs.

His response is revealing: shouldn't they want to create something entirely their own?

For Corthout, visuals are most powerful when they emerge from an artist's individual identity rather than simply following an existing trend.

That ambition reached another level with Tomorrowland and Insomniac’s Unity experience at Sphere in Las Vegas, a project that took approximately a year to develop.

Even with virtual reality simulations, the experience of standing inside a venue surrounded by such an enormous screen was unlike anything he had encountered before.

"It was the biggest undertaking so far for my company, but also the most rewarding."

Interestingly, Sphere also gave Corthout something he had almost forgotten, the ability to experience a show purely as a spectator.

After years spent analysing every technical detail of live productions, he found himself genuinely surprised again.

And perhaps that sense of wonder is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.

As immersive technology advances and artificial intelligence becomes more prominent in creative industries, the possibilities for visual spectacle seem almost limitless. But Corthout is cautious about confusing technological sophistication with genuine emotional impact.

It's a perspective that feels particularly relevant at a time when technology can generate increasingly convincing images, but the question of what makes something meaningful remains much harder to answer.

For Corthout, the future isn't about removing the human element. It's about giving creative people more extraordinary tools.

His ambitions are already extending beyond electronic music, with an upcoming immersive classical music project, Symphonic Horizons, exploring how orchestral performances can exist within entirely digital environments.

But whether it's an intimate production or a Tomorrowland stage experienced by thousands, the philosophy remains remarkably consistent.

The technology may become more advanced. The screens may become bigger. The worlds may become increasingly impossible.

Yet the goal is still the same, to make people feel something they couldn't have experienced anywhere else.

And perhaps the real magic isn't that Prismax can make a digital world look completely real.

It's that, for a few unforgettable moments, nobody in the crowd feels the need to question the difference.