Hey VJ!

[imomus]

Well, I'm back in Berlin, and for the next week or so I'm working on two design-related articles, one about a Japanese fashion company, the other about VJing. By "VJ" I don't mean the person who presents the videos on MTV (do they even have videos on MTV these days?) but the person who designs and "performs" graphics projected during the presentation of music in a nightclub or concert hall. And I'd like your help. Here's a little questionnaire which I'd love you to answer in the Comments section. Include an e mail address if you like, so that I can write to you.

1. You're not a VJ yourself, but you have a favorite VJ or a peak experience in a dark place involving the combination of visuals and music. Tell me about it!

2. You are a VJ yourself. Tell me about your work! Do you have a website?

3. What experience do you have of VJ hardware and software? Name names! Tell me your good and bad experiences with various packages. Have you customized your software or hardware?

4. What's your live set-up? Do you mix live feed from cameras in the club (or arena, if you're that big!) with pre-recorded graphic loops? Do you doodle on top of found Super 8? How do you work?

5. Is your work a collaboration, and if so, who does what? Do you consider the bands you work with clients or collaborators?

6. Tell me about being a designer who works in real time, there in the club, responding to unpredictable events. Is it, well, like playing an endless sax solo or something? Isn't that a tough thing to do, to "design" right there in public, in real time?

7. How would you like to see VJing develop in the future? Are there amazing new capabilities you'd like to see built into software? (Personally, I'd like to see "the scent organ" from Brave New World implemented.)

8. Question for the audience. Do you actually watch what's on the screen behind the band? Where does it take you, if anywhere? Is less more, or is more more?

9. Um, a question about Marshall McLuhan might fit here. Marshall McLuhan and lava lamps and Pink Floyd and the gesamtkunswerk and living in a gloopy web of electronic goo... Have all the arts come together? Is it a big meltdown or a big letdown? Should we all go and read a good book instead?

10. Is there anything I didn't ask you and should have? Oh, okay: "But is it art?"

(The picture is of Japanese design geniuses Delaware playing live at Club Milk, Ebisu, June 2001, which gives me another chance to link to their lovely song Graphic Designin' in the Rain.)

Comments

[anuisance2you.livejournal.com]

Some of the best VJing I have seen is from a band called PulsePrograming, who are out of Chicago I think. For a while they were opening for seemingly every vaguely electronic band I saw, so I've had the opportunity to see them 3-4 times.

Here's the only really informative link I could dig up. http://www.aesthetics-usa.com/artists/pulseprogramming/bio.html

That site describes them as "a Multimedia Collaboration" and lists the a Film/video person amongst the band members.

The live shows included a screen front and center of the stage with the band behind and off to the sides of the stage, often obscured by the screen. The video seems to be proprietary and not "found" or stock stuff, and many of them seemed as if they were just high quality home movies or goofy videos of people dancing, riding bikes, wheeling around an office on a chair, etc. The great part of it was that the video seemed to be tied to the performance in some very physical way. The video would stutter or reverse in conjunction with the beats. I'm not sure if there was a microphone in the video rig that sensed that or if there was some sort of midi setup or what, but what at first seemed like random shifts in the video, were clearly tied to the musical performance. Like those old disco lights that were tied to the VU meters on your hi-fi.

Cornelius was also a good VJ show, interacting with the music as well as the performers. And Monster Magnet had a good show back when they were the middle band of a 3 band metal set in a 1200 person venue. It was an overhead projector with a set of colored oils being pushed around by a little electric stirrer.

[(Anonymous)]

Ambrose (ambrosewhite@yahoo.com) says: a couple of things:

- in my experience, VJs tend to do two things that leave room for improvement: rely on too small a stock of images, so that familiar loops constantly reappear without progressing the experience. secondly, they fail to provide a cioherent narrative, or sense of meaning. VJing strays dangerously into the territory of those who continously set up hours of on stage laptop and FX tweaking and fiddling, which is fun to produce but for an audience, is often entirely unsuccessful. viz The Commitments "jazz is musical wanking". The scope for VJs to produce something amazing, coherent and relevant is extremely apparent, but the reality seems to boil down to little more than 10 or so clips cycled and cut up.

- i have seen some Vjs achieve something greater than the sum of their parts, unfortunately I cant rememeber realyl any in particular.

- finally, you might like to look here: http://www.aufderlichtung.de/
some german VJs, it seems, from hamburg, who havea very natty site, and its fun to look at that even if you cant gain anything else from it. I foudn ti through betalounge, looking for a dj koze video set that is apparently hosted by aufderlichtung, but I have wasted far too much time trying to hunt for it on their site.