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

Hey Momus

[vj-grasshopper.livejournal.com]

I'm a VJ in Vancouver, Canada. You can find plenty of info about what I do, including my demo reel, at www.vjgrasshopper.com.

Here's some quick answers to your questions:

1. n/a

2. My website is www.vjgrasshopper.com. My work has consisted mostly of doing live visuals for DJs; however, I am leaning toward working more in performance settings, such as dance and theatre. I have written an article called "Notes toward a Kino-stage" that I will posting on my website shortly. Or, if you're interested, I could e-mail to you.

3. I work with VDMX and GRID PRO made by the good folks at Vidvox (www.vidvox.net). Their programs are fantastic, and enable me to mix video clips with a live video input. VDMX also has a feature called Fontsynth, which allows me to type in words that are instantly projected. I never thought I'd use it, but it turned out to be damn handy.

4. Recorded clips + live input + fontsynth. I've also built a kaleidascopic extension for my mini-DV camcorder that creates some wild effects. There are some examples of these on the demo reel on my website.

5. I haven't participated in any collaborations with musicians, so I suppose their all clients to me.

6. It's tricky. Sometimes I try to match the tempo and feel of the music. Sometimes I respond more to the crowd around me. Last week there were a bunch of aggro drunken guys milling around, so I started playing slow, psychedelic stuff. I'm not sure how much it helped, but the drunks did shut up.

7. My ambition is combine audio and video mixing. Become a kind of A/V-J. This desire started, somewhat unconciously, when I was back in film school making conventional 16mm films. We edited the celluloid directly on an ancient monster of a machine called a Steenbeck. This is a tedious process, and often late at night, all sleep deprived, the other editors and I would begin to toggle the film back and forth, playing it at one quarter speed forwards, then 8x speed backwards, and so on, creating all kinds of fascinating audio and visual effects. Just what we needed to break the tedium of all night editing. I started to realize that these impromtu Steenbeck mixes were often more interesting than the resulting finished films, and this started me down the path to VJ-dom. Now, I want to re-create some of these strange moments by stretching and bending not only the visual element of video, but its audio component as well. Often, conventional, silent VJ-ing results in nothing more than gooey wallpaper. So, I hope that in the future, we VJs get past that.

8. n/a

9. I hope all the arts continue to come together. When a VJ is considered a musician, then I'll be happy.

10. You know it's art! And I actually have a 'Live Visuals FAQ' on my website that includes other basic Q & A.

Where can we read your VJ article?

Re: Hey Momus

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your answers! The article should be online at Adobe's site somewhere in a month or so.

Re: Hey Momus

[(Anonymous)]

hi my name is Morris La Mantia aka Lucidhouse

www.lucidhouse.com

here's a few quick answers

2) I’ve been evolved in creating art for most of my life, from curating and running galleries to animating and producing my own short films. My work as a “Veejay” is just a continuation of my art, in fact I feel much more exited now, as I’m able to take my art into a club, lounge, festival environment where a lot more people can see it than in any Art gallery. My web site is WWW.lucidhouse.com have a look, there’s a lot of streaming clips… most of my work is self made, with bits of sampled stuff.

3)I’m not too obsessed by the whole software and hardware thing ….as long as it does what I want I’m happy. My priorities are compact simplicity. I use Resolume to VJ with, for creation I use After effects, flash, photoshot, dig cam, scanner.


4) My live set up is simple and light, I react to the musical mood, nuances, pace. I don’t really pander to the whole DJ ego thing, so don’t really use a camera on the DJ’s. I find this a total waste of screen space, there’s nothing that’s visually exiting about seeing someone’s hands spinning black discs…?

5) I see myself as a collaborator, that’s where the challenging creative stuff happens. Just being a service provider for a client can be very limiting.

6) Reacting and mixing in a live environment keeps you on your toes, I love anticipating what a musical mix is going to do and second guessing the mix. Same of the best, unpredictable stuff happens live.

7) Vj’ing is just a natural progression of music, a lot of Dance, trance, house, electro is quite abstract, good visuals enhance, amplify this music, sometimes adding a kind of dialog, narrative to this abstractness and giving it more depth. It’s gone full circle really… silent movies had the piano man to accompany the films and now the visualist is there to enhance and react to the music.

10. Is it art? Some of it.
The temples/churches of yester-year had booming sound systems, great acoustics, organs, singers, and employed Artist services to create the verry best of murals, stained glass widows and sculptures. Today’s temples are the nightclubs/festivals and it seems that they’re employing the same techniques…