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The Book

Excerpts from 'Portrait of a VJ'

  Mark Amerika

 

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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Other text extracts

VJing and Live A/V Practices
Narrative Motors
The Number-Image
The Contrary of the Movie Theater
The Art as Research
Excerpts from 'Portrait of a VJ'
The Aura of the Digital
VJ Scene: Spaces With Audiovisual Scores