At present, everyone is claiming to have been the first: the first »Live Visuals Award« for the club circuit in Berlin, for example, which was introduced to the public at the start of July. »Cimatics«, the VJ festival in Brussels, which enters its second round at the end of October. As far back as February, the »1st International Visual Studies Conference« promoted the academic reception of the decisive »iconic turn«. And in Vienna, too, the organizers of the »equaleyes« congress, which took place in mid-August in the Museum District, named it »the first summit meeting for visualists, gaze-addicts and see-fanatics«. At any rate, by employing a steady visual practice and theory, the new picture mixers seem for the first time to be establishing themselves even in the mainstream as ambitious cultural technicians.

» Before 2000, when I told people I make video live, I would get a blank uncomprehending stare. Now I tell people I make video live, and they say, >of course, so you're a VJ.<« That’s how the New Yorker Benton C. Bainbridge describes the increasing acceptance of his job.

VJs like to see themselves as the new techno-nomads. Their number is increasing as equipment becomes steadily cheaper, lighter and thus more easily transportable. Dinosaur hardware like non-portable computers, video recorders and all those tons of monitors can be left at home. If you want to make visual compositions, loops and samples dance these days, it is enough to have a laptop with special software. It took more than a decade, until past the nineties, for the name »DJ« to etch itself on the popular memory as a basic word. And now, as their self-confidence grows, »VJs« (visual jockeys) are also claiming the status of protagonists in their own right. They are founding communities and networks. Equipped with labels, they appear in formations and act as the initiators of new performance methods.

Expanded visions
In the hierarchy of clubs and concerts, the visualists appeared for a long time as marginal figures that supplied the visual periphery to the sound centre. This seems to be changing now. DJ Hi-Fi Princess and VJ Beq Stupak have joined forces as »Spiralkind«. VJ Beq Stupak does not take the back seat either on flyers or during performances: she mixes her images right next to her DJ colleague.

In the case of the Mego company, a Viennese techno label, the simultaneous generation of music and video at live gigs as a total approach has been a matter of course for around seven years. The equality of sound and image has long been a basic element in audio-visual productions created by the beat minimalists General Magic and the design and video artist Tina Frank. However, it was always the music that acted as a trigger for the visuals. With Kids Pix, a software programme for children, Frank reversed the procedure. This time, with the sound of her computer pen she supplied the resource material for the musicians’ laptops.
There is another current trend in the audio-visual field that shows how, increasingly, several protagonists are tending to control (audio-) visual spaces. SAT (la societé des arts technologiques) in Montreal, for example, re-broadcasts in real-time on the Internet the streams fed in by international VJs. VJ jam sessions are now also a growing trend, a phenomenon that Tina Frank also confirms. The classic music-video format that Frank, among others, used to build up her video-art career from 1997 onwards is starting to lose its interest for her, she says. »By working with the musicians over the course of many years, I have evolved an individual formal language for each of them«, says Frank about the development of her live VJ sets. In collaboration with Pita, for example, Frank works with only a few colours, in keeping with the reduced tunes: »Red, green and a lot of black. Mostly limited to lines.«

The dance floor has engendered many different types of electronic music, and there are plenty of indications that different genres are starting to manifest themselves in the VJ culture as well. » I've found that certain aesthetics dominate regions - real world imagery rules London, Berlin visuals tend to be minimal, hard-edged and urban, while the San Francisco Bay Area mixes are often psychedelic, swirly and colourful«, says Benton C. Bainbridge in conversation with Solu from Finland, a VJ based in Barcelona. She complains about the gender relationship in her field. Male VJs dominate, just as male DJs do. Cultural activists like Solu are working on the historiography of their field on her website. They make VJ pioneers their much-cited idols. Among others, the guerrilla team EBN (Emergency Broadcast Network) symbolizes much the same thing to the visual community as the mix veteran Grandmaster Flash to DJ culture. At the start of the nineties, this American group, which took a critical stance on the government-friendly reporting by US media, remixed the news images from the second Gulf War.

EBN member Greg Deocampo, the developer of the pioneering 2-D animation programme AfterEffects, has re-emerged from media oblivion after several years. He is back with the »Video Baby Grand Piano«, a sort of VJ turntable in a kitsch white piano case. »Video needs to be linked to a musical interface so that it can be performed instrumentally, reactively, interactively. As these reactions and interactions become subtle and fine, suddenly video can be made and played expressively, virtuosically.« That is how Deocompo looks towards the future, while fellow EBN member Gardner Post remixes past history – from TV images taken from Gulf War reporting in 1990 and the war in Iraq in the year 2003.

Irony and agitpop

As an agitator and lobbyist for a »Free Culture« - also the name of his latest publication – the US lawyer and cultural activist Lawrence Lessig has declared war on the vehement copyright restrictions of the entertainment industry. Such counter-strategies are currently in trend in the field of visual culture. In the audio area, commercial efforts and legal pressure by big corporations have already led among other things to the closure of the biggest free download exchange, Napster. Lessig has mobilized resistance with his pamphlets against the multinationals. He has got the so-called Creative Commons, a non-profit organization on the Web, on side and inspired a culturo-political movement that has already branched out considerably. Creative Commons, a sort of communications and self-service store, assumes that many people want to share their creative works with others – and thus want to promote and facilitate the right to reproduction, modification and distribution of their works on the Internet, rather than insisting on their copyright.

Jan Lauth, co-organizer of the equaleyes congress and member of the Viennese VJ association pooool, feels that this model should be incorporated into future platforms. Low budget or no budget is quite usual with VJ activities, according to Lauth. He says a picture archive could therefore take into account the paid use of visual works as well as their non-commercial use. And, he says, the already existent association Eye-Con.tv should include the sharing of means of production and PR work as well as a VJ booking agency.

The visualists seem to be emancipating themselves from their big DJ brother in a sensible way organizationally, at least. To regard audio and video separately at a hierarchical and theoretical level would certainly be a step backwards. Or a marketing gag that is still best promoted with a superfluous DJ wallpaper? »I am on tour doing visuals for the Beastie Boys. Next stop, West Coast USA«, writes VJ Benton C. Bainbridge on his web site, while the next generation is already on its marks and raring to go: the MJs – media jammers or jugglers. They want to operate both audio and video and thus push the digital mutations still further.

http://equaleyes.org
http://eye-con.tv
http://www.pooool.net
http://www.cimatics.com
http://www.frank.at
http://www.mego.at
http://benton-c.com
http://www.solu.org
http://www.sat.qc.ca
http://creativecommons.org
http://www.vjcentral.com

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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