Actualizing the Vision with David Schunemann

Inside a darkened room, swirling bioluminescent textures, hyper-detailed 3D landscapes, glitched sacred geometry, and towering projection-mapped environments pulse in perfect synchronization with the music, transforming the stage into a living, digital organism powered by Actualize. Denver-based visual artist David Schunemann, known professionally as Actualize, has built a reputation for manually performing immersive visuals in real time using custom effects, projection mapping, and MIDI-controlled animation, bringing cinematic depth and intentional storytelling to artists like CloZee, LSDream, Of The Trees, and Ravenscoon. Alongside him, Glass Crane contributes an unmistakably surreal visual language rooted in psychedelic sculpture, cosmic architecture, and fluid dreamlike motion, creating imagery that feels equally inspired by visionary art galleries and underground rave culture. Together as Actual Crane, the pair blur the line between concert production and interactive art installation, crafting audiovisual experiences that feel less like a show and more like stepping inside a lucid dream.

Actualize lighting up The Caverns in Tennessee.

Denver’s visual underground is in full spotlight tomorrow, on May 28, at Cervantes' Masterpiece Ballroom as Actualize and Glass Crane present their collaborative audiovisual project rooted in Denver’s thriving art-forward electronic scene. Presented as a visual-centric experience built around projection mapping, immersive stage design, and community-driven creativity, the night pairs a secret music lineup with a stacked roster of visual artists including Papabear, LAIA, and Mind Balloon. The show arrives at a moment when Denver audiences  are increasingly excited about visuals being just as expressive as the music itself, a shift Actualize has helped shape through years of work alongside his contemporaries. Fresh off major productions at Red Rocks and national festival stages, Actualize brings that same large-scale cinematic energy back home to Cervantes with an all-new projection mapped stage and a night designed to spotlight the evolving relationship between music, visual art, and collective experience.

Ahead of this resounding evening, we had the chance to dive in with Schunemann about his recent experience at Red Rocks and what he’s got in store for this upcoming showcase.

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Alyssa: “We watched a lot about that Ravenscoon opening weekend at Red Rocks. How'd that feel?” 

Actualize: “Hell yeah. Oh, that was fun. Yeah, yeah, that was really cool.”

Alyssa: “What was special about doing the opening weekend?”

Actualize: “I mean, it was just really special in a lot of ways. I've known Paul for like a long time, Ravenscoon, so it was really cool to get to see him headline Red Rocks. Watching him grow from you know, playing much smaller venues to be able to do that. It's very inspiring and just cool to see. And I got to work with Jason Leech for the first time there, which was really fun. I got to work with Jared Oppenheim from The Gradient Perspective, and we've worked with him [in the past], like I met him almost 10 years ago now at Big Dub and he hired me to do visuals there. And so it was just a cool full circle moment because we don't get the opportunity to work together much. It was cool, but for Jason Leech it was really cool because I did something that I've never done at Red Rocks before, which was having the cameras be the central focus of the entire show. So, Jason Leech does all this live piano key stuff, so he wanted it all to be shown on the screens. He's like, "I want people to see what I'm doing the whole time." Another thing was Ravenscoon gave everybody um full access to all the LED walls, which was really, really cool.

So most of the time, you know, when you're an opener or working with a support act at Red Rocks, you only get you know, like a portion of the LED wall, like a small little piece and then for the headliner there's way more LED wall and it's bigger and epic, much more epic. For this show, they let everyone use all of it. So even during Jason Leech's set, it looked like a headliner set. We had everything but lasers and pyro, you know, (Laughter) so it looked really good. And that was just really fun because there was so much extra LED wall. And doing opening weekend at Red Rocks is always really fun. I feel like I end up there pretty often actually. Last year it was the Icelandic Winter on the Rocks or something, and it was like early March. It was even earlier than this show. I was there with Zingara and we were supporting Gramatik. And then the season before that, I think I did the last show with Of The Trees. So I often end up like on the last or the first show, or both.”

Alyssa: “You just mentioned that you were doing more directed content towards these individual producers, individual artist shows. Have you felt new-found pressures and new-found challenges, being the person that they trust with their vision for the show?

Actualize: “Definitely. It feels very cool to be respected enough to have my opinion matter to people like that, you know. I'm really grateful to work with all these people, and it's really cool that they do trust me with their vision and it's a very collaborative process. We work together closely to make sure that it is their vision. Like for Zingara, we just did this massive content project for her Parallel Spirits tour, which was the co-headline with Level Up, and we really went in on that project. She had a whole ton of ideas of things she wanted to make. And another thing that's new, [this new] software that I use a lot with these kinds of teams and artists, is ShowControl, which essentially gives you the ability to run timecode so that you can build out essentially a full music video that's synced to a track. So when they play that track on the CDJs, it will trigger the video and stay in sync the entire time.”

Alyssa: “That's so interesting. So tell me more about this Actual Crane show. Where did you find inspiration for that?”

Actualize: “So basically it all started with the first visual-centric Cervantes show on the Other Side, which was just kind of just to test the waters and see if an event like this could work. And um— yeah. It worked. It worked really well and it was cool because we didn't have to announce any music at all and we just announced a VJ lineup. I mean the flyer design was pretty cool too.”

Alyssa: “It's so cool that the visual side has become a more concrete and integrated part of shows. People have come to expect a certain level of curation.” 

Schunemann at work in Meow Wolf Denver.

Actualize: “I absolutely think that these events that we're throwing could like, you know, if we promote it properly and we really put a lot of time and energy into making these events special and different and unique, I think that we have the opportunity to go far with these types of events. I think like doing something that or even, you know, even being able to do Cervantes' Ballroom is like really, really cool to be able to do something like this, but being able to do it on a larger scale where people who are less familiar with it will hear about it. I think it would just be cool to be able to make that kind of impact. It would be a big win for visual artists everywhere.”

Alyssa: “Do you think the people in Denver are interested or up for this type of thing, specifically around VJs?”

Actualize: “Oh yeah. I honestly think so. More here than other places. Because here it's like people really have a focus not only on the show, but the visuals because like you said, it's at every show, it's expected and there's shows every night of the week of every size. It's like a new renaissance, you know. I feel like because these art forms are relatively new and unexplored, when it comes to visuals, stuff that's specifically made to just pair with music and are cool to look at, so when something is unique and different visually, they notice.”

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As Denver continues to charge into this new renaissance of audiovisual integration, the May 28 Actual Crane show at Cervantes' Masterpiece Ballroom will no doubt be one of the most uniquely fun events of the year. shifting the spotlight toward the screen and the stage design. Actualize and Glass Crane are not just providing entertainment, they are validating the visual artist as a cornerstone of the live experience. Whether you are a dedicated fan of the underground or a newcomer to the scene, Actual Crane promises to be a masterclass in design. Don't miss the chance to witness this evolution firsthand in the heart of Denver's thriving electronic scene.

FOLLOW Actualize: Official / Instagram / YouTube

Conversations and Explorations on Generative Visual Art with Actualize

Denver-based visual artist David Schunemann, or more familiarly known as Actualize Visuals has been diligently cultivating his most progressive body of work to date. Carefully collaborating and decorating stages across the country summer after summer, Actualize has become a household name amongst the wider fandom of digital visual artists and designers.

Directly influenced by painters, 3-D sculptors, animators, and live performance, David aims to create an act that not only accompanies top-tier musical artists, but adds an undeniable depth to every experience. Building off of natural moments of hype, the vibe, and his own take on relevant art in the adjacent scene, he builds an unforgettable dive through vivid dreamscapes, ardent colors, and creative movement. While the pool of visual artists and VJ’s has steadily grown in both size and manifest talent across the last five years, David’s work continues to speak volumes about the sheer tenacity behind his confidence.

Appropriately, The Rust took advantage of an opportunity to sit down at a downtown Denver cafe and speak about the Actualize vision, perspective, and manifestations. 

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The Rust: Where do you hail from, and where are you now?

David Schunemann:  I am a transplant to Denver, a brand new transplant. I am from Boston. I was born in the Boston area and then moved up to New Hampshire when I was like 8, and then lived there till like 3 or 4 years ago and moved back down to boston. Lived there for a while, but now I am here. 

The Rust: What brought you to Denver?

David: Mainly music and art.

The Rust: Where did it all begin? How did this project get started?”

David: I guess just going to a lot of events. I started going to shows in 2016, electronic shows, and I just was like automatically addicted. It was the craziest shit I had ever seen. As soon as I went to my first electronic music festival I was like, “I've seen bands play before but it's not like this.” The stage production in general is crazy. My first festival was Mystery Land in 2016. It was at the original Woodstock grounds actually.

The Rust: Wow, in upstate NY? That's a legendary venue.

David: Yeah, it only happened for like 3 years, then someone bought it and fucked it all up. So it’s not a thing anymore, but it was amazing when I went. After that I just started going to as many music festivals and shows as I could go to. Then after about a year of going to non-stop events. I simply needed to know how it all worked, I needed to understand what's happening here. I started like looking shit up online, diving into it, trying to figure out what was actually going on. The video mixing thing I thought was super cool. I kinda tried DJ-ing a little, but once I realized you can do the same thing with video, it was over. Essentially, just mixing video, you can do it even crazier than you can mix audio. You can have infinite layers, run effects through everything, and route shit different places. The effects are not just limited echo and delay, you can do literally everything. Fuck, you can stack as much as you want until you build something insane.

The Rust: Did that start by combining your audio with your video? What's your speciality?

David: Yeah! What I specialize in is like building custom effect stacks (in Resolume). So I will take tons of different effects and stack them on top of each other in a way that makes something really cool and unique. Then you can go into each of those effects and make different parameters audio reactive or whatever you want. So when the bass hits the whole thing or fine tuned parts will wiggle or shake, change color, or flex.

The Rust: I love that subtle movement in visuals, especially on a big stage or screen.

David: Yeah, not the whole thing. Just very fine tuned. The fact that you can do it live and on the spot with any piece of video content, picture, anything. Just completely blew my mind. As soon as I realized you can do that, I was all in. Playing with it like everyday. Friends would come over and put on music. I'd be like “Yo, check this out.” I would end up sitting there while my friends are just chilling.

The Rust: So it was basically all consuming for you?

David: Insanely.

The Rust: Your first festival was in 2016; it's now 2022. When did you start making your own visuals?

David: 2017, pretty much right away. I have been doing it full time for like 4-5 years now.

The Rust: What did you go to school for?

David: I went to school for software engineering actually. I was working software engineering jobs while I was going to all these festivals. So that was kinda funding everything. Then I got laid off in 2018. I got another job and I had been working that job for a couple years and doing visuals on the side. Then I got laid off again at the beginning of the pandemic, and I was like, “Alright, I don't really want to do this anyway. There is probably a reason I keep getting laid off.”

So after that I was like, “fuck it.” Whether I make money doing this or not, I'll figure that part out later.

The Rust: Completely. I love that train of thought. Fuck it, might as well make art. Can I ask how old you are?

David: 30. So I started going to festivals around 25.

The Rust: Where does the name come from?

David: When I first started I thought about it a lot. Like, what I wanted my name to be…. something. Because I wanted it to be something that kind of reflected what I was doing, then also sound cool you know. It literally came to me at a G Jones show. He is one of my biggest inspirations. Visually and also musically because it is so experimental. He is just trying things no one else thinks to try.

The Rust: He’s earned his reputation through and through.

David: Yeah, so I was getting my mind blown and someone came up to me and told me he did all his own visuals for that tour. I was like, “How? How does someone even have the time?”

What's my excuse? So he had all these visuals with eyes. And there it was... Like “Actual” “EYES”.... Actualize. All he did was actualize the eyes. I was cracking up. In the beginning my name was Actual Eyes. I quickly realized I didn't want to make eye-based content. Then someone messed it up on a flier and put Actualize and it stuck. It looks way cooler and had my motivations all wrapped up in it. So it's also a reminder to myself to just do it. Just wake up and do it.

The Rust: “What’s your excuse?”

David: Yes, exactly. If G Jones can make all his own shit, touring, making music, and incredible visuals. “What's your excuse??

The Rust: Is that how you approach art? Just hit the ground running?

David: Yes. pretty much. Just do it, make art.

The Rust: You spoke earlier live sets. Do you do all your visual sets live?

David: Oh yeah, definitely.

The Rust: Like mixing the movements and textures? Interacting with them?

David: Yes, all live. A lot of it is literally being made on the spot. It's not like I prerender a whole lot of content. Like, I have content that I have either made, bought, or been given over the years. But what I do live is run it through all these custom effect stacks so it looks like something totally different. Then I can switch between the different effect stacks, layer them on top of each other. Speed it up, slow it down, change the colors. Put trails on it, make it vibrate, shake or whatever combination. So basically, I just like playing with it. Listening to the music and playing with the toys that I have and trying to match the speed and the vibe, the colors of the stage and everything.

The Rust: It's like you're reacting, even playing with the musician(s). 

David: Yes, exactly. It's amazing practice doing it live. It makes me a better VJ everyday.

The Rust: So I normally ask musicians this but how do you describe your art? To a layman, what’s your style?

David: Man, it's tough because there are not really well defined genres within visuals. Psychedelic, for sure. Effects-based, psychedelic, geometric, live experiential art, I guess. I like music and art experiences, so [my art is] where those two meet.

The Rust: What can we expect from you this summer?

David: Gotta keep an eye out to find out, but more than one line up should be dropping here in the next week or so. 

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Alongside some of the most high-profile visual artists in his field, David hopes to captivate audiences in the same way he was captivated back on the fields of upstate New York. The future is clearly set, and David's mission above all else is the successful progression of art, music, and this particular creative culture. For those of us that get to attend music festivals this summer, Actualize will be one to set your alarms for; a sight for your actual eyes. 

FOLLOW Actualize Visuals: Facebook / Instagram / Official