I. Sense Components
Begin
“Two worlds confront each other, the world
of culture and the world of life, the only world in which we create,
cognize, contemplate, live our lives and die or- the world in which
the acts of our activity are objectified and the world in which
these acts actually proceed and are actually accomplished once and
only once.” -M.M. Bakhtin1
What Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and literary scholar, chiefly
concerned with the novel, ironically calls to our attention draws
a fuzzy boundary between the embodied process in momentary experience
or “real-time” actions, improvisations, interactions,
generative processes or simulations and how we utilized media to
create representations or reflections of this experience we refer
to in narrative forms. Bakhtin was expressing the limitations of
the medium of literature or print media and technology. We know
that technology is closely tied to creative production, influencing
mass scale media or major forms of creative expression and leading
to the convergence of our acts and their objectification. As computational
speeds increase and technologies become more inexpensive and pervasive,
our media world changes from a focus on functions of representation
or expressions to those that include components of our experiences-
momentary acts, performances, improvisational play and participatory
culture. VJing practices are an expression of this change and represent
a continued desire for the intersection of the senses, such as sight,
hearing and the performance and interface of the body. VJ and live
A/V practices bring a convergence or mixing of the elements of rhythm
and movement in a sensorial and motorial engagement and construction,
from the extended interfaces of sensors used in performance, to
mass scale gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii.
What happens in the movement from states media where we are identified
through representational practices, to a mediascape based on actions,
preferences and performances that we create and share? Newer media,
such as games, socially interactive website/databases, simulations
and live A/V performances or VJing practices are situated in an
embodied cognition and environment that bear momentary, time pressured
relational processes, engaging and interacting persons and environments
in complex ways quite different from more traditional, representational
and mass scale media and arts practices. What bubbles to the surface
is that these occurrences cannot be explored through the use of
representational structures, as they are more than what can be represented
and require a thinking from and an analysis related to content that
is generative, participatory, interactive, communicative, simulated,
performed and experiential in nature. New fundamental qualities
of these forms emerge, such as rhythm and movement, dramatic intensities
and performance.
The interplay and interaction in VJ practices of performers and
content, work that is often both composed and improvised in a collaborative
environment, as well as physically manifested and interfaced in
the body, require us to rethink and expand our toolbox of inquiry
beyond representation and into presentation, the experiential and
convergences of the psycho-social-physiological.
Early Abstract A/V Practices- Rhythm and Movement
“All of a sudden it hit me---if there was
such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as
composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't
there be figures of motion?” -Len Lye
“We perceive rhythm in three different
ways. There’s rhythm we can hear, rhythm we can see, and rhythm
we can feel.”2
Creative and artistic practices abound with an art of movement
that synthesize the audio-visual and the body and are as old as
any cave paintings. In Western art, there is a historical intersection
of musical practices in visual work dating back to the early 1920s
with the film experimentation of a number of artists that captures
the kind of abstract, non-narrative and other formal elements, the
qualities of performance and generative work that feed into VJing
and similar practices. The work of artists like Hans Richter, Walter
Ruttman, Viking Eggeling or Oscar Fischinger, for example, create
convergences and remediations of the audio-visual-performed. This
early work was influenced by the nuanced, abstract and time-pressured
expression of movement in audio and visuals and a kind of delight
in the sensorial and performed moment. Contemporary A/V work can
be traced as coming out of earlier work beginning with “light”
or “color” organs, instruments designed for the live
performance of light and visual media beginning in the mid 1700s,
as well as early filmic and animation experiments.
Early filmic experiments drew an impetus from the convergence of
photography and dramatic arts, as well as practices on how images
change frame-by-frame in the creation of the moving image. These
forms come together in notions of depiction in portraiture, “capture”
in landscape photography, as well as performance and frontality
in the dramatic arts. The work grew to be no longer captured time,
but time-based, organized around either a “frame rate”
of change or the pulse in music. Performance was also time-pressured.
The marriage of waveforms of sound and light established in experimental
cinema and animation, or an art of movement. This work now shares
its history with VJ practices, a context for working, based on movement-
rhythm (pattern, repetition and tempo) and measures of dramatic
intensity (power/strength). Finally, sound and image is extended
or augmented through varying relational performance strategies of
the body. With the introduction of interactive software and fast
personal computing, this experimentation becomes creative performance
practice in real-time- usually improvisatory and collaborative work
between artists/VJs and musician/composers/DJs.
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References
1 M.M. Bakhtin, Toward A Philosophy
of the Act (Austen: University of Texas Press, 1993)
2 Bruce Block, The Visual Story:
Seeing the Structure of Film, TV, and New Media (Boston: Focal Press,
2001).
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