Each summer, hundreds of thousands of music lovers descend upon the Belgian town of Boom for Tomorrowland—one of the world’s most ambitious and immersive music festivals. Since its founding in 2005, the event has evolved beyond a destination for electronic music and become a heightened experience of architecture, storytelling, technology, and performance. This year’s edition, “Consciencia,” invited festival-goers into a world inspired by the full spectrum of human emotion, from sadness, love, and anger to joy, wonder, and desire.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
On unforgettable sets designed with towering sculptural elements, real-time visuals, pyrotechnics, and sound, some of electronic music’s biggest names played for over 400,000 people, including Martin Garrix, David Guetta, Alesso, and Calvin Harris. At the center of the immersive experience was Tomorrowland’s spectacular main stage, where six monumental faces embody the emotional landscape of “Consciencia.” As artists perform, the scenery transformed in real time, allowing each set to unfold as a singular visual and sonic experience.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
The creative force behind these immersive environments is the Belgian visual design studio Prismax, whose work extended beyond the main stage to include the Library, Freedom, Core, House of Fortune, Crystal Garden, and Atmosphere stages. At each, guests were immersed in highly designed spaces filled with unique elements set to their themes—including oversized domes filled with mystical nature, multi-level warehouses decked out in LED architecture, indoor-outdoor castles shining with stained glass and pointed cupolas, structures of giant mythical faces appearing to float through cutting-edge audiovisual production, and more.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
In celebration of Tomorrowland 2026, Whitewall spoke with Prismax co-founder and CEO Joris Corthout about collaborating with the festival on design elements since its foundation, the technological innovations that shape production, and the challenges and rewards of creating a world that exists in constant motion.
Behind the Scenes: Tomorrowland 2026
Joris Corhout of Prismax, Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WHITEWALL: You’re the CEO and co-founder of Prismax. How would you describe the work your studio does and is known for? What ethos or DNA defines a Prismax production?
JORIS CORTHOUET: Prismax is a creative studio from Mechelen, Belgium, living on the border between visuals and technology—about 35 people, half artists, half engineers, most of them a bit of both. We’re best known for the video worlds on the Tomorrowland stages and for Unity, the Tomorrowland show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. What makes us different is that we don’t pre-render images and press play: with xLive, the platform we built on the Unreal game engine, our visuals are computed and performed live, like a computer game played at an enormous scale. That’s the Prismax DNA in one sentence—craft plus invention. Our niche is so specific that half of the time we’re inventing it ourselves, so every production has to push both the art and the technology a step further.
Designing Tomorrowland’s Spaces
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: How did Tomorrowland 2026 come together? What were the initial conversations like about tone and atmosphere?
JC: It always starts with the story, never with the technology. Tomorrowland’s creative team develops the theme and the world—this year “Consciencia”—and in the very first conversations nobody talks about screens or pixels; we talk about what people should feel. From there, the physical design and the visual universe grow together over many months, and our role is to translate that world into moving images that live on the stage. Because we’ve worked together for so long, there’s a shorthand between the teams: they know what our technology can carry, and we know how their world should feel. By the time the first beat drops, thousands of decisions have been made—and then the live show starts, and the real fun begins.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: Take us BTS and share with us the specifics of how this was physically constructed. How many people over how much time? How did it move in phases? How many collaborators, etc.?
JC: I have to be careful not to take credit that belongs to others: the physical construction—the steel, the sculpting, the build on site—is the domain of Tomorrowland and their stage builders, so I won’t guess at their numbers. Our part is the digital layer that brings the structure to life. For the main stage alone, a core team at Prismax works for months on the content, in constant dialogue with Tomorrowland’s creative team and in parallel with the physical design, so that screens and set are conceived as one image. On site we install and sync the server cluster that drives the visuals, rehearse, and then perform live during every show.
Reinventing a Music Festival’s Scenes
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: How does Tomorrowland offer something new to the long-standing festival? What’s unique?
JC: The festival’s superpower is that it reinvents itself every single year—same hill, completely new world. This year’s main stage is the most ambitious one yet, built around six monumental faces, and for us it was a playground like no other. The moment I’d tell nobody to miss: the main stage after sunset, seen from high up the hill, when the faces, the lasers, the water and the visuals become one living organism. That’s when you understand why we do this. Also, all the other stages have their own stories. From the Library stage, which focuses on bringing a huge library to life with our xLive-run visuals to more technology indoor stages like the Freedom (with floating sky) and the new concept on the Atmosphere stage.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: What do you hope the audience felt at this year’s presentation?
JC: Everything. That’s the honest answer this year. “Consciencia” is built around the primary emotions of human experience, so the show deliberately travels through them: wonder, joy, melancholy, desire, even anger. If people come off that hill having had goosebumps at least once—one moment where the music, the stage and the images hit them as a single thing—then we’ve done our job. The technology should be invisible; the feeling is the product.
Inside “Consciencia”
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: What were you personally excited about seeing or doing there? What was a highlight from opening weekend?
JC: Weekend one gave me a highlight I hadn’t asked for. Because of the drought, fireworks were banned, so we brought the fireworks to the screens and performed them digitally. Seeing tens of thousands of people react to fireworks that existed only in pixels was a special kind of satisfaction—and proof of why we built our technology to be flexible in the moment.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: This year’s theme was “Consciencia”—a world built around the primary emotions of human experience, moving from sadness, love, and anger to joy, wonder, and desire. How did this translate into the sets we saw? The landscapes the audiences explored?
JC: “Consciencia” is a gift for visual storytellers. The stage carries six sculpted faces, each embodying a primal emotion, and the visual worlds we created move through those same emotions—each with its own landscapes, its own color language, its own rhythm. Sadness doesn’t move the way joy moves; desire doesn’t glow the way wonder glows. And because everything runs live through xLive, that emotional journey isn’t a fixed film: it breathes with the music, so a set can sink into melancholy and erupt into joy a few minutes later. I think that’s why this theme landed so hard—everyone on that hill recognizes themselves in at least one of those emotions.
A Sensorial Take on Visual Storytelling
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: How did the sets technically change around them as the music progresses?
JC: This is where our heart beats. Traditionally, stage visuals are pre-rendered: computed frame by frame weeks in advance, and locked. We work the other way around. xLive runs on the Unreal game engine, so the worlds on the screens are computed in real time, during the show, and our operators perform them the way a musician plays an instrument—pushing the intensity, launching a new sequence on the beat, following the artist’s energy as the set unfolds. I sometimes describe it as playing a computer game at an unseen scale. If something bigger has to change, we adapt the 3D scene and see the result live within minutes instead of days. That flexibility is exactly what made it possible to perform digital fireworks when the real ones weren’t allowed.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: Your work was seen in the festival’s Library, Freedom, Core, House of Fortune, Crystal Garden and Atmosphere stages. What were these spaces like?
JC: Every stage at Tomorrowland is its own universe, and that’s exactly how we treat them. The same live technology runs underneath, but the emotional register changes completely per stage—an indoor space like Freedom wraps you in light in a way an open-air stage never could, while a stage like Core asks for something organic and mysterious rather than spectacular. My standard advice to visitors is, don’t camp at the main stage. Some of our most beloved work lives in the smaller worlds.
Prismax x Tomorrowland
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: Your partnership with Tomorrowland dates back to the festival’s first edition, now spanning over two decades of experiential work. How would you describe the collaborative work you’ve been able to achieve through this partnership? What do you hope it’s known for?
JC: Tomorrowland and Prismax essentially grew up together—the festival’s first edition and the founding of our studio both date from 2005, and our paths have been intertwined ever since. We went from the VJ booth to building the virtual edition of the festival during the pandemic—which is where our live technology was really born—to Unity at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Since last year, We Are One World, the company above Tomorrowland, is also a shareholder in Prismax, which made official what was already true: we make each other better. Nobody else has the technology to translate their storytelling to a stage the way we can, and nobody pushes our technology further than they do. If this partnership becomes known for one thing, I hope it’s what becomes possible when creativity and technology trust each other completely for twenty years.
Courtesy of Tomorrowland.
WW: For a first-timer to Tomorrowland, how do you recommend them to go about the festival?
JC: Don’t over-plan. The line-up will pull you in ten directions at once, but Tomorrowland is a place you discover with your feet: arrive early, walk the whole site, and get lost in the small corners—that’s where the magic hides. See at least one stage you’ve never heard of. And at least once, climb to the top of the hill at night and watch the main stage from up there. You’ll understand everything.
WW: How were you experiencing Tomorrowland?
JC: Working—and I honestly wouldn’t want it any other way. We perform the visuals live, so during the shows I’m right in the middle of it with the team. It’s the best seat in the house: you feel the crowd, you feel the artist, and you’re playing along with both of them. After more than twenty years, that feeling hasn’t worn off for a second.
WW: What are you listening to right now?
JC: After his very cool performance this year on the main stage, Boris Brejcha!
