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The Book

VJing and Live A/V Practices

  Andrew Bucksbarg

 

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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Other text extracts

VJing and LiveA/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