At Tribeca, with our phones sealed in the dark, a forty-year argument came back into focus. Madonna has never simply released music. She has released visual worlds, and she is still inviting us inside.
There was something almost radical about being asked to put our phones away.
At the Beacon Theatre, during Tribeca, before Madonna premiered Confessions II, the room was handed back something we rarely get anymore: attention. Our phones went into sealed pouches at the door and stayed there for hours. You could hear them clicking shut, one after another, a whole theater slowly locking itself away from the outside world. No cameras. No glowing screens. No proof of being there except the body itself, sitting in the dark, waiting for the image to begin.
Jesse and I were there for Motionographer. But I was also there as someone whose understanding of live performance, of the music video, of editing, stage design, and Motion Design has been shaped, over and over again, across my whole life, by this one artist.
For more than four decades, Madonna has treated pop not as a genre but as a total visual system. A Madonna song rarely arrives alone. It arrives dressed, lit, edited, choreographed, projected, framed, and staged. It arrives with a room built around it. A mythology. A body. A camera. A confrontation.
She has never simply released music.
She has released visual worlds.
She has never been the one touching the software, and she is still one of the great Motion Designers of our lifetime, the author of the system every frame served. Almost nobody calls her that.
Consider this love letter forty years overdue.
That is why Confessions II feels bigger than a companion film for a new album. Directed by David Toro and Solomon Chase of the creative studio TORSO, the film premiered at Tribeca on June 5, 2026, and reached the world on YouTube three days later. Built around the first six tracks of her new record, it moves as one continuous piece, a fever dream told in chapters, always circling back to the place where so much of her language was born: the dancefloor.
And in a cultural moment ruled by algorithms, optimization, and synthetic perfection, it feels defiantly, almost stubbornly human. It is sweaty. Physical. Cinematic. Performed. It opens with Madonna ambushed by a squad of camera-wielding figures, hunted through room after room, and it never lets you forget that a real body is being chased through real space. There is beauty, but it is never polished into emptiness. There is control, but it never fully surrenders the possibility of collapse. It is exactly the kind of unapologetic, adult, dangerous imagery the old gatekeepers at MTV would have banned on sight, which is another way of saying it is alive. Visual spectacle is not powerful because it is flawless. It is powerful because someone had to risk something to make it.
The first visual teacher
Long before I had language for Motion Design, Madonna was teaching me how an image could move. Every new video felt like a challenge. Every tour felt like a dare. She made me want to be better, visually. Not just to make things move, but to make movement mean something.
And once, she reached further than the eye. I can point to the exact moment my spiritual life began, and it is not a church, and it is not a book. It is Ray of Light, and above all “Frozen.” That album came out of Madonna’s own awakening, after motherhood and a period of searching, and what she found poured into the music and the images together. Something in “Frozen,” that desert, that black fabric moving like weather, that voice, opened a door in me that has never closed. I say this without irony: a pop record was the birth of my spiritual journey. Except it was never only a record. I did not just hear “Frozen.” I saw it. Which is the whole argument of this piece in a single memory: with Madonna, even the soul arrives through the image.
That is what art does to a human being at full strength. It does not decorate a life. It redirects one.
When I later taught at NYU, I showed Bedtime Story to my students every single semester. I would play it without giving them the year, then ask them to guess when it was made. Almost always they said recent. Three years old, maybe. Five at the most.
Then I would tell them: 1995.
That was the lesson. Not nostalgia. Not technology. Timelessness. Real art does not expire. It escapes its timestamp. Directed by Mark Romanek, one of my heroes, shot by Harris Savides, designed by Tom Foden, Bedtime Story was built as an homage to the female surrealists, to Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Frida Kahlo, a dream that never agreed to age. It now lives permanently in the film and video collection of the Museum of Modern Art. This was never disposable pop imagery. This was a work of art.
Bedtime Story, 1995. Directed by Mark Romanek. Frame from the official video, Warner Records.
And Madonna knew it. She has always known the exact moment a screen could become more than a screen. She proved it again and again: Vogue with David Fincher, Frozen with Chris Cunningham, Ray of Light cut by Jonas Åkerlund into a Grammy-winning blur of speed and city light, Hung Up with Johan Renck framing the disco ball as a sacred planet.
Madonna has always understood that pop memory is visual memory. We do not only remember what she sounded like. We remember the room she built around the song.
The body is still the technology
One of the most moving things about Confessions II is how completely it trusts the body.
In an era shoving visual culture toward synthetic smoothness, the film leans the other way, into weight, contact, breath, sweat, gesture, presence. The camera does not use the body as decoration. It follows it as evidence.
Confessions II, 2026. Directed by TORSO. Frame from the film, Warner Records.
This has always been the engine of Madonna’s power. She is a conceptual artist, yes, but she is a physical one first. Her ideas refuse to stay abstract. They land in muscle, in costume, in lighting, in rhythm, in exhaustion, in discipline, in performance.
The body, for Madonna, has always been a site of argument. A woman’s body. A queer body. A Catholic body. A desiring body. An aging body. A grieving body. A body that flatly refuses to become invisible.
For women, she made desire visible without apology. For queer people, she made theatricality and sexuality and defiance and chosen family feel not merely permitted but powerful. She did not invent those cultures, and she was never carrying them alone, but she amplified them at a scale the mainstream could not look away from.
A Madonna concert is not simply a concert. It is a three-hour spectacle of permission. It carries you to the highest highs imaginable, through sex, religion, grief, fashion, humor, politics, pain, camp, discipline, and release. It makes excess feel sacred. It makes survival feel glamorous. It puts the outsider in the center of the room.
For those of us who grew up scanning the culture for any sign that we were allowed to exist fully, Madonna was not just entertainment.
She was evidence.
Waiting for the costume change
Here is a confession of my own. Every time Madonna tours, I buy tickets to five shows, in five different countries. I have done this for years, and not because I am a completist. It is because the spectacle is too dense to read in a single pass. So I give each night a different assignment. One night I watch only the choreography. One night, only the screens. One night, the lighting, the transitions, the way the stage rebuilds itself between songs. It is how you study any masterwork of design: you keep returning until the system reveals itself.
And every night, in every country, there is a moment I secretly wait for.
The costume change.
Not because I want the show to pause, but because I cannot wait to see what she will put on the screens. That in-between space, where another artist would simply fill time, is where Madonna lets the visual world expand. The screens become emotional architecture. Images dissolve into other images. Bodies fragment. Faces multiply. Symbols surface and vanish. Editing becomes choreography. Those transitions are never dead air. They are dramaturgy. They hold the audience inside the dream while, backstage, the body becomes someone else.
I learned how personal this could get on the Drowned World Tour in 2001. Closing the Geisha act, while she transformed backstage, the screens erupted with a montage cut from Japanese animation, most indelibly Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, the 1997 anime whose editing grammar filmmakers have been borrowing from ever since. I sat there stunned, and not only because putting Kon on arena screens in 2001 was a wildly early piece of curation. Around that same time, in my own much smaller corner of the industry, I had designed the DVD interface for Perfect Blue, the menus, the motion, the experience a viewer traveled through before the film began. Madonna and I were holding the same artwork at opposite ends of the scale. I was building the small ritual that led you into Kon’s world on a television screen. She was detonating it forty feet tall over a crowd.
Sometimes she used that same in-between space to detonate something else entirely. On the Sticky & Sweet Tour in 2008, the interlude built around “Get Stupid” filled a costume change with pure Motion Design: live-action Madonna composited into a rapid-fire montage of famine, war, and a melting planet, then sharpened into open political provocation, setting John McCain beside Hitler and Mugabe, and Barack Obama beside Gandhi and Lennon, in the middle of an American election. Both campaigns condemned it. I was in the room for that one too, and what stays with me is not the controversy. It is the placement. The slot most artists treat as dead time is where she chose to make the most dangerous argument of the night, and she made it in edited motion, not in words.
Because for Madonna, the stage has never been only where performance happens. The stage is an interface. A cinema. A ritual machine. Long before immersive became a marketing word, her tours were treating the stage as a living screen: the MDNA Tour and its thirty-six motorized LED cubes endlessly rebuilding the room around her, and the immersive worlds of Rebel Heart sliding between her newest material and her deepest catalog. Then a Super Bowl halftime where thirty-two projectors swallowed the football field under the stage and thousands of LED pixels drifted across a darkened stadium to spell the words World Peace, and a Celebration Tour that carried her over the crowd on a floating portal while real-time and AI-generated dreamscapes shifted behind her. Different decades, different technologies, one belief: music is spatial. Music can be built. Music can become a place.
Rebel Heart Tour visuals. Courtesy Moment Factory.
Super Bowl XLVI halftime show. Courtesy Moment Factory.
That is the lineage Confessions II belongs to. And almost no one has built more memorable places than Madonna.
The human system
Madonna’s recent comments about artificial intelligence have traveled fast, because she spoke with unusual force about the difference between content and art. She argued against a culture that mistakes frictionless production for creativity. Chasing numbers, she said, chasing followers and streams and the safe bet, is the opposite of taking risks, and taking risks is the whole of what makes art art.
Here is what gives that argument its weight: she is not drawing the line from the outside. Her entire career is the counterargument to fear of technology, and on the Celebration Tour she was one of the most visible early adopters of generative AI in live performance, her team using Runway’s text-to-video tools to build the shifting worlds behind “La Isla Bonita” and “Take a Bow,” hundreds of generated frames culled by hand. She has been to the frontier. She came back with a point of view. This is not fear of the new. It is a defense of authorship, and the real question was never whether technology belongs in art. It is whether technology is being used to deepen human risk or to replace it.
That is where Confessions II becomes a statement of principle. The film literally opens with Madonna hunted by machine-eyed camera squads, and answers them with nothing but bodies: the performer willing to be seen, the choreographer building tension out of muscle, the director choosing where your attention goes, the dancer sweating through repetition until an idea becomes physical.
Confessions II, 2026. Directed by TORSO. Frame from the film, Warner Records.
In other words, the human system.
For a great many Motion Designers, whether they realize it or not, Madonna helped write the grammar of modern visual performance. The cut on the beat. The body framed as icon. The stage as world. The screen as confession. The camera as accomplice. These are not small inheritances. They are part of the language our industry still speaks every day.
The room after the film
The title is doing work. A confession is not just an admission. It is a performance of truth. It needs a witness. It turns private experience into shared ritual.
Confessions II runs on the logic of night. The kind of night where bodies loosen. Where strangers become temporary family. Where the lights flatten every hierarchy in the room. Where grief and pleasure can share a single beat. It knows that dance music has never been superficial for the people who actually need it. For queer communities, for immigrant communities, for club kids and outsiders and survivors, the dancefloor has always been a form of shelter. A church. A battlefield. A mirror. A machine for remembering who we were before the world told us to behave. Madonna did not invent that truth. But she has spent her life turning up its volume.
Confessions II, 2026. Directed by TORSO. Frame from the film, Warner Records.
Because there were no phones, what I carry out of that night at the Beacon is not footage.
It is sensation.
Outside the Beacon Theatre, June 5, 2026. The only pictures I have from that night, taken minutes before every phone in the building was sealed shut. Photo: Carlos El Asmar.
The audience rising. The sound moving through the room like weather. Anderson Cooper, of all people, in conversation with Madonna once the screening ended. The strange vertigo of watching an artist who has been projected at impossible scale for your entire life suddenly sitting there, human-sized. And when it ended, we spilled out onto Broadway with nothing to post and nothing to show, so we did the oldest thing there is. We turned to each other and told what we had seen. For one night, a Madonna premiere ran on oral tradition.
For once, the image did not instantly convert into content. It stayed an experience. Some work asks for that. Some work needs darkness, a room, bodies sitting together, uninterrupted. Madonna has always understood spectacle, but spectacle is not the same thing as scale. Sometimes it is a football field becoming an illusion. Sometimes it is a single video rewriting the visual language of pop. And sometimes it is a theater full of people being asked to put their phones away and remember how to look.
The album Confessions II, released July 3, 2026, reunites her with Stuart Price and extends the world first opened by Confessions on a Dance Floor two decades ago. But Madonna is not returning to the dancefloor because she has run out of places to go.
She is returning because the dancefloor was always a portal.
Frozen, 1998. Directed by Chris Cunningham. Frame from the official video, Warner Records.
A place where music becomes architecture. Where bodies become image. Where the self can be remade without asking anyone’s permission. Transformation, in her hands, is not a phase. It is a practice.
I can testify. Somewhere between a surrealist dream in 1995 and a sealed dark room in 2026, that practice rearranged what I make, how I see, and once, what I believe.
The technology will keep changing. The tools will get faster, stranger, more seductive by the month. But the work that lasts will still demand a point of view. It will still demand risk. It will still demand bodies, taste, timing, obsession, contradiction, and care.
Madonna has known this all along.
She has never simply made songs.
She has made worlds.
And somehow, after all these years, in a sealed dark room with our phones taken away and our attention handed back, she is still inviting us inside.
Confessions II – The Film
Artist: Madonna
Directors: David Toro and Solomon Chase (TORSO)
Choreographer: Damien Jalet
Costumes: Dolce & Gabbana
Production: DIVISION
Premiere: June 5, 2026, Beacon Theatre, Tribeca Festival, New York
Album: Confessions II (Warner Records, July 3, 2026), produced with Stuart Price