You may know Russell Preston Brown as that “Adobe guy” (as Steve Jobs once dismissed him) who either: 1) brought Thomas Knoll and Adobe together to create the product we now know as Photoshop or 2) wears silly wigs. He is, of course, both: serious thinker and blithering goofball. Which is to say, he’s one of us: A creative thinker and a child at heart.

It’s been a couple of weeks since this happened, but on February 18—at an internal Adobe/NAPP event celebrating the 20th anniversary of Photoshop, which you may remember from a recent Martini Hour—Russell proffered one of the best examples of digital-imaging performance art I’ve seen.

Here’s a frame in which Russell severs his hand before a live audience.

It’s nearly 20 minutes long. If you don’t have the patience to watch the entire thing, skip to exactly 4 minutes in. That’s when the magic show starts. And it truly is something to behold.

(I wasn’t there. My boys and I were skiing that weekend. But this one movie makes me feel as if I witnessed the whole thing.)

Definitely hang on until the 9-minute mark. That’s when my jaw figuratively fell on the floor.

Near the end (at 16:30), Russell “demonstrates” an upcoming feature, content-aware fill (revealed in some detail with John Nack and Bryan O’Neil Hughes on another recent Martini Hour). What’s amazing about this part is, what you see is more or less how the feature works.

Past and future in one crazy live demo. It really is pure excellence.