Mark Amerika, META/DATA,
The MIT Press, forthcoming Spring, 2007
1.
What a VJ is not:
• A VJ (video/visual jockey) is not an MTV personality.
• A VJ is not a net artist.
• A VJ is not a visual DJ.
• A VJ is not susceptible to computer crashes (i.e. believes in
the power of positive thinking).
2.
What a VJ could be:
• A VJ could be a hyperimprovisational narrative artist who uses
banks of quicktime movie clips to construct on-the-fly stories composed
of images processed in asynchronous realtime and through various
theoretical and performative filters
• A VJ could be a creative writer who manipulates matter and memory
by composing live acts of image écriture repositioning
the movie loop as the primary semantic unit of energy
• A VJ could be a Tech*know*mad whose fluid Life Style Practice
captures consciousness in asynchronous realtime and is forever being
remixed into One Ongoing Text Exactly
• A VJ could be a (h)activist provocateur who knowingly intervenes
in the mainstream art, club and cinema culture and opens up new
possibilities for hybridized art and entertainment events
3.
Ten Things You Can Say About VJ-ing Without Wondering If It's Necessarily
True:
1. What You See Is What You Get
2. What You Get Is Simultaneously Cinematic and Pixilated
3. What You Transgress Is Video Art
4. What You Point Back To Is Video Art
5. What You Refrain From Repeating Is Video Art
6. What You Do Is Change The Way You See
7. What You Steer Clear Of Is Conceptual Art
8. What You Reinvent Is Beauty As A Subliminal Force In Consciousness
9. What You Create Is Always Hyperimprovisational
10. What You Avoid Is Theorizing Your Practice To Death
4.
Recently, while touring parts of Asia with my camcorder taking
in the neon nighttime scenery while I hastily passed through the
varied urban and ambient environments surrounding me, I improvised
some more Action Script entitled "R.E.M.ix" that began
as follows:
The Body Is An Image-Making Machine
It Filters Information
It Creates Dreams, Memories, and Realtime Situations
Made Out of Images
The Images Are Created In the Body As They Respond
To Images Outside The Body
The Images Change As The Body Moves
These Movement-Images Resonate With the Dreams, Memories, and
Realtime Situations Made Out of Images
Memories Always Take Place In The Present, As Do Dreams
This Means That Realtime Situations Made Out of Images
Can Be Dreams or Active Memories
The Artist Is A Body-Filter That Uses Subjective Plug-Ins
To Manipulate Image-Information And In So Doing Begins The Process
of Myth-Making Oftentimes In A Narrative Context Even When The So-Called
Narrative Is Itself An Anti-Narrative That Works Against Conventional
Storytelling and Standard Rhetorical Spin-Control
Then after writing these initial notes, realizing that my own Action
Scripting was itself a kind of “theoretical fiction” swimming in
a sea of contradictions, I asked myself a follow-up question that
was at the nexus of my VJ practice as it encountered the soft nudge
of a theory-to-be that kept scratching at the inside of
my skull, namely: what is the relationship between image, memory,
dream, and body?
And why are my VJ performances always TELLING THE STORY of a digital
flux persona who is constantly processing image-information?
Does this mean what you are reading now is also a kind of VJ performance
dressed in fictionally-constructed “poetics” clothing?
Where is this VJ artist (digital art persona) located and will
we, in fact, ever SEE the body of the artist processing these images?
And what does it take to create a moving image of what it means
to dream or have an active memory so that it doesn't look like the
obvious, i.e. a video situation made out of live action footage?
How do these VJ mixes create a realtime fictional memory for this
digital flux persona who is always processing images and is this
fictional memory then something that did not happen, but that he/she
is either dreaming or hallucinating as if it did and, since we are
experiencing it in realtime, IS happening for the viewer who watches
the live performance?
Is it true that this fictional memory always takes place in the
present, and not as a record or reflection, that is, can a hyperimprovisationally-constructed
fictional memory take place in realtime?
Just the idea of “a hyperimprovisationally-constructed fictional
memory” would seem to challenge any notion of realtime. But then
again, what are our options when trying to circumscribe the Now
in an altered state of consciousness like the one we associate with
the white hot act of creative composition? If not taking place in
realtime, then when? Unrealtime?
It is times like these that I once again think of the term “hallucination,”
but not as in the conventional understanding of the term, that is,
as a drug-induced hallucination where someone sees something that
is not there but, rather, as in recent research in the psychology
of perception, where we imagine hallucination referring to the fact
that the embodied mind actually CREATES what it sees as a kind of
body-brain achievement.
And as a VJ who constructs nomadic narratives in this timeless
time of the non-place place where aimless drifting is the moral
equivalent of casting the die so as to never abolish chance, what
kind of connections can I even begin to make between image-making,
fictional memories, (un)realtime dreams, and situational hallucinations
that the embodied mind (with its technological attachments – its
prosthetic devices) actually CREATES when it sees? And finally,
given the fact that my prosthetic devices are now attached to my
body as it pushes itself forward in aesthetic wanderust, what does
it mean to have a hyperimprovised body-brain-apparatus
achievement?
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