VALIS (Vast Active Laptop Intelligence System) is an effort to explore live collaborative electronic music. Taking the premise that laptops have evolved in their own rights as musical instruments, with the capability to be vehicles of personal expression, the event allows electronic musicians to mine the theoretical boundaries of Jazz and Jam music, intersecting at points between pre-planned structure and free-form exploration. Using Drum and Bass as a starting point the music takes on a life of its own, often to startling and innovative results. The name was picked as homage to Philip Dick, whose visionionary writings might have predicted such a marriage of the organic and mechanical in expressing an art as old as life itself.