VISUAL JAZZ
June 29th, 2010Rise of the VJ
By Adrian MacDonald and Theresa Jones, with additional reporting by Leone Fogle
Welcome to the future.
“To tell you the truth I don’t really know what a VJ is,” says Steven Severin, talent booker for the popular Seattle music clubs Chop Suey and Neumo’s. “Is that to do with video people?”
More exactly, VJ stands for “video jockey,” or sometimes—for self-respecting practitioners looking to avoid an inevitable association with the cheeky MTV hosts of the same name—“visuals jockey.” As a DJ spins records, the definition goes, a VJ spins video, mixing and scratching a series of images in a live performance set to music.
Proponents say the possibilities in VJing for a new improvised audio-visual art form are endless, and Seattle clubs and concert halls will soon be filled with dancing, moving images mixed live. “Visual elements can do a lot to enhance and magnify group energy levels,” says one local VJ. “So live mixers can modulate the room in much the same way that good DJs can.”
Thanks to modern digital technology, VJs can pull together vast amounts of imagery in time to a beat using little more than a laptop computer, a projector, and the right software. They draw from whatever sources inspire them: original footage, abstract designs, movies, animation, TV shows, commercials. Copyright, the prickliest subject in the VJ universe, tends to fall under the radar as cut-and-paste artists reference, recontextualize, and reappropriate the iconic and obscure alike.
Twenty-five year-old Jacob Stone is one of Seattle’s most successful VJs and considers himself a “curator” and promoter of the form to the largely virgin audiences of the Northwest. Since starting his own production company as a student at Mt. Rainier High School in Des Moines in 1998, he has traveled the world as a VJ and tour manager for the veteran Seattle-based techno-rock band KMFDM, and has mixed images behind the electronic music world’s top DJ stars like Paul Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk, and John Digweed.
“It’s very improvisational with KMFDM,” he says. “Typically I have a palette I’m working from. It could be a scare film from the 50s, animation I got from a friend, or a mash-up of things. I will keep a constant thread. I kind of feel the crowd out too.”
Stone says the band has been together for some 23 years and their fan base welcomes what he does. “[KMFDM has] a strong visual presence and a definite aesthetic, and the fans are tuned to that. It’s not a generic rock band. The audience is fine tuned to this constructivist, Cold War, Soviet look.”
In other venues, however, the concept of live video mixing can be less understood.
“Seattle has a VJ scene but the infrastructure for where people perform is not established,” says VJ scobot, a prolific local VJ who performs regularly at the See Sound Lounge and organizes a monthly “VJ Night” seminar at 911 Media Arts Center. “We’re still having this conversation with club owners about, ‘why should I pay a VJ when I have a DVD player?’”
scobot, who preferred to be called by his uncapitalized VJ moniker for this article, says Seattle audiences are only slowly warming up to the idea of live video mixing in their nightclub experience. “I’m sure DJs had the same conversation when that [movement] was starting,” he says. “Why pay a live DJ when you can just have prerecorded music? Now, to a club owner it’s like, ‘I already have to pay a DJ, why should I pay a VJ?’”
In an effort to bring VJing more into the public eye, Stone and his production company Punch Drunk Productions are the organizers of perhaps the world’s only head-to-head VJ competition, the Opticlash VJ Battle in Seattle, which had its second run at the Seattle International Film Festival last June.
In a series of heats, 8 VJs with names like Porchlight Star, Epiphanous, and Pixelflip mixed video clips in one-on-one competition, playing off a live score of electronic beats provided by a team of DJs. After each round, a panel of judges picked winners based on criteria like originality, how well the visuals related to the mood of the music, and whether the visuals were in time to the music. One judge, Cheryll Hidalgo of the Seattle Academy, noted she was also looking for “a balance between directed narrative and stream-of-consciousness.”
In the last heat, scobot went against Leo Mayberry, known as KillingFrenzy, the reigning champion from the first competition in 2005. scobot’s palette of images throughout the night had involved ballet dancers, 1960s social dances, and Indian classical dancers, while Mayberry took a darker route with footage of bombed-out Hiroshima. In the final round, Mayberry turned up some images of Indian classical dancers to play off scobot, but scobot ultimately took the prize—a trophy, an Edirol V-4 Video Mixer, and the adulation of the tight-knit Seattle VJ community.
But even with the efforts of Stone, scobot, and others, VJs remain virtually invisible in the Northwest’s cultural landscape. Elsewhere, there can be more respect.
In 1990s London, a hotbed for stylistic innovations in electronic music, groundbreaking VJ crews like Coldcut, Hexstatic, and Addictive TV made names for themselves by using digital technology to mix and scratch moving images to music, the way a DJ would with records. Today those artists help inspire a generation of practitioners looking to redefine and expand the form.
Coldcut, the single most influential group in the VJ world, and Hexstatic both produce albums on enhanced CDs that package original music with VJ mixes.
Addictive TV, meanwhile, made news in 2002 for landing lucrative contracts with Hollywood production companies to remix movie trailers, in the same way a DJ would create a remix or “mash-up” of songs. Silly, manic, and danceable, their reimagined trailers for Snakes On A Plane, The Italian Job, and the Antonio Banderas film Take the Lead are part of those films’ US television marketing campaigns. The group also helps produce Optronica, an annual VJ festival in London held at an IMAX theatre at the British Film Institute.
In Seattle, VJs in clubs are commonly at the bottom end of the pay scale, or get paid last, says scobot. When they are hired there is an ingrained sense from club owners and audiences alike that a VJ “exists for the greater glory of the DJ.”
The medium has a long history however, dating back at least to the psychedelic light shows of the 1960s. Robin Oppenheimer, a Seattle-based media arts historian, says the light shows of that time consisted of fifteen to twenty people stationed behind the stage at a rock concert, gathered around a dish in front of a projector and moving around drops of color, cutouts, slides, film, found objects, and anything else they could come up with to make an improvised collage of images.
Oppenheimer considers these shows “expanded cinema,” defined as an immersive experience meant to engage and ultimately change audience members’ consciousness while dancing to the music.
Still from a VJ composition
As the psychedelic movement progressed, light shows evolved into two main styles: West Coast, which emphasized colors, shapes, and flow, versus East Coast which was nearly pre-punk with strobe lights and hard edges. Andy Warhol once tried his hand at the Eastern version, mixing colored light into his films in what he called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
According to Oppenheimer, Seattle had two key light show groups, the Lux Sit and Dance Light Show, and the Union Light Company. All of the equipment from the Lux Sit and Dance is held now in the archives of the Experience Music Project in Seattle.
Light shows in that form faded out with the onset of disco, when parties moved from large, free spaces to controlled clubs with dance floors illuminated by flashing cubed lights. The visual element of parties began moving away from painters and visual artists who liked working with their hands; soon after came the age of pixels and video in the 1980s.
For much of the 80s, scobot says VJs had to work with immensely complicated and expensive hardware setups, generally involving a video mixer, which at that time was a specialized piece of machinery that simply blended clips from 2 videotapes. The mixer cost $10,000 and relied on the operator to provide huge amounts of tape.
The infrastructure necessary to make VJing an accessible art form would not come until the rave scene of the 1990s, as personal computers became smaller and cheaper, multimedia broadcasting techniques evolved, and the advent of Windows 98 and advances in the Macintosh platform made software solutions ever more prevalent. Since 2000, scobot says, increasing numbers of software programmers have been creating ever more creative VJ applications, with several jockeying for the lead in a wide-open market.
“The concept of visuals to music goes back to shadows on the cave wall,” says scobot. “Think about ballet—it’s a visual representation of music. Just the technology has changed. The tools have enabled it to be more accessible.”
The key tools in the VJ’s arsenal today are a laptop, projector, software program, and mixers, with other peripherals optional. The idea is to mix, cut, decay, alter, or put effects onto video clips.
Leo Mayberry
For his VJ shows at clubs and other venues around town, scobot typically takes just his laptop and a pre-organized library of video clips, and mixes them live using the ready-made VJ application Arkaos. Stone has a similar rig for shows, using a competing application called Resolume. To scratch and adjust the speed and direction of the clips, the way a DJ would by hand with records, both use Edirol MIDI controllers, made by Roland.
Audiences, they say, also respond well to seeing footage of themselves mixed and manipulated on the screen, an effect made possible by a USB webcam. “It’s pretty exciting when they get that there’s someone actually controlling the camera image and they start to react to it—like we’re dancing together,” scobot says. “I love that.” (Although he adds that more often than not the video feed leads to guys standing in front of it and flipping off the camera. “That’s like the most cliché move,” he says.)
Unlike DJs, who all typically use the same setup with 2 turntables and a mixer, VJ setups are nearly as various as the number of VJs. A range of external mixers exist on the market, such as effects mixers that don’t alter the source content and are controlled by the press of a button. Music-responsive mixers are also available, that pulse the source image in response to a rhythm.
Scott Keva James, another local practitioner, used the program Macromedia Director to develop his own video mixing software he calls “The Doer.”
“I come from live mixing from the direction of being an improvisational musician, and I’ve tried to build this tool [The Doer] to be as much like a live instrument as I can,” James says. “I’m very interested in the act of ‘playing’ live, much more than creating an edited piece.”
James says people usually want to hear that The Doer is capable of syncing images with the beat of the music, but he intentionally stayed away from such a device. “The syncing should be done by me as much as possible, and not by the machine,” he says. “If I can’t keep a beat, if I can’t respond to other players in a creative way, then maybe this isn’t the best art form for me.”
Other VJs, like Leo Mayberry, winner of the first Opticlash VJ Battle in 2005, use the widespread Max/MSP programming environment with its Jitter add-on to manipulate video and create new effects.
Mayberry, also known by his VJ name KillingFrenzy, starting experimenting with video art during the 80s, and describes his first entrée into the technology as painstakingly scanning frames one by one into his computer for an entire day to get a 3-second clip. The effects at that time he says were largely used to make a clip look more pixilated or digitized to fit the “video look” of the era.
As technology continues to change and improve—including online media sharing and the widespread availability of high-end, ever more portable video equipment—the number of clips to use and the ability to create new footage is almost limitless. Meanwhile image quality continues to go up, and scores of new video effects come on the market.
But Mayberry still says he maintains about the same level of frustration with the equipment today as he did in the 80s. “I’m always trying to do something harder than what I can accomplish with the available equipment,” he says. “It takes an artist to navigate and harness this technology, and to raise it to a form of art.”
To the end of pursuing live video mixing as an art form, many VJs say they walk a fine line between being background “wallpaper” to a DJ and a party crowd, and trying to tell a captivating story with visuals in the sense of a film or performance that absorbs an audience’s attention.
“Sometimes it’s very appropriate to be background, and sometimes it’s appropriate to be foreground,” says James, who has a regular VJ gig at Oscillate, a weekly party hosted by the Baltic Room on Capitol Hill. “I’m actually interested in finding venues that are not really just a screen hanging in the back of a club, and also aren’t some kind of sit-down ‘watch a movie’ situation either. The one situation kind of forces live visuals to be an adjunct to music and the other makes it just stuck in the paradigm of movies, which is really just an artifact of mid-20th century technology.”
VJ scobot
VJ scobot, who performs regular club nights at the See Sound Lounge in Belltown, says there is little danger of a VJ pre-empting a club’s social scene by providing too-alluring visuals. “I think 95% of people in clubs are not dancing,” he says. “They’re nervous about meeting people and how they’re being seen. You need to build an environment where people feel comfortable.”
“I’ve performed lately in a few sit-down theaters, where people are silent and stare and listen and it’s a bit freaky really,” James says.
Nonetheless, people like James balk at the term “VJ.” Aside from the MTV connotation, many in the field feel the term inadequately describes the full scope of live video mixing—an art form that involves more than simply being the video equivalent of a DJ.
“I consider VJing to be essentially remixing other people’s movies and content, and I almost never do that,” James says. “I have done what I would call ‘VJing’ for some dance nights, parties, and what have you, but it’s always someone else’s idea, and usually involves getting well paid.”
Some push for the more high-brow term “visualist,” or even “vision mixer.” To James, his work is more equivalent to a “laptop composer/producer.”
One of his current projects in this vein is working with a symphony orchestra in Springfield, Ohio, through his Seattle-based production company The Now Device. The symphony contracted James to shoot, edit, and produce a 5-screen live video production that plays behind the music, following the theme “Manufacturing in America.”
Among his interests for expanding the form is to make the experience increasingly immersive, using building surfaces with control systems to create an effect “more like playable sculptures than movie screens.” For the orchestra project, he is designing and fabricating custom-shaped screens, which he considers a start in that direction.
“Years of ‘video installation’ art is established in the art gallery world, but now we’re talking about live video art,” scobot says. “The problem for the art world is how do you present the art? It’s as if we had paintings, but no one had figured out how to hang the paintings on the wall.”
Still from a VJ composition
scobot has his own ideas for expanding the form beyond the dance club VJ model, including mixing to live jazz or spoken word. With rock bands, he finds, the difficulty is mostly in matching the images to the lyrical content of the songs, requiring significant amounts of work upfront that tends to go unappreciated.
“I’d like to put the technology into the hands of the hearing impaired,” he says. “Think about it, it’s a whole group of people who communicate solely through visuals. They should know about this—what kind of poetry can they tell?”
Despite the rapidly expanding nature of the form, however, VJs and “visualists” alike still contend with one hurdle the technology can’t overcome: copyright law.
“I use a ton of reapplied material,” says Stone. “Coldcut does that too. It’s a natural thing to use things from culture.”
In a show Stone did for the opening of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, he says museum officials were adamant that no copyrighted material be included in the mix—particularly from Star Wars or Indiana Jones, since George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were reportedly in attendance. “It really restricted what I could do,” he says.
For the show, Stone relied in large part on the Prelinger Archives, an Internet database of old film reels in the public domain, such as public service announcements and World War II propaganda films. Another legally clear source is the Creative Commons, a non-profit Web site where artists can post their work to be shared in the public domain, with their own specifications on the level of permission they require.
But images from these limited sources are a small fraction of the cultural material VJs consider crucial to adequately capture an audience’s imagination. Stone argues that VJs sample pop culture largely to express themselves and their experience of the world, not to make money from others’ work and property.
“Mostly a VJ is not going to threaten the creator financially,” he says. “If you sample a part of the movie 2001 you do it because it’s iconic, people have an emotional attachment to it, it’s relevant. For the most part you’d think the creators wouldn’t even care. But then put 10,000 people in the audience, with the gross revenue of the event in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and maybe they do deserve a cut. No real strict precedent has been set.”
Kraig Marini Baker, a media and intellectual property attorney with David Wright Tremaine in Seattle, says in the new field of VJing, artists need to be aware of the risks inherent in the form. “There is always great art that is made by people who take risks, but you should have your eyes open and know those risks,” he says.
Every company that owns media has its own restrictions and leniencies, Baker adds. The important thing, he says, is to use video clips in a “transformative” way—it would be much more difficult for a VJ to argue a copyright case where a clip is used purely for entertainment, as opposed to one where it is used as an artistic or political statement.
Opticlash
Which begs the question: are VJ shows art, or just entertainment? Baker points out that the light shows of the 60s were never considered art at the time, but for the generation that produced them they represented an earnest search for a new consciousness, linked to counterculture and the protest against the Vietnam War. Slides of political figures would be mixed into the collage of images, eliciting a strong response from the audience. Light shows still aren’t recognized by the majority of the art world, but galleries and museums are beginning to notice them and, Baker says, “recontextualize them as art.”
“It’s ‘remix culture,’” says Stone. “I can’t imagine that it won’t continue growing and expanding and reaching more folks. It’s all around. Images are coming faster. There’s more to comprehend.” Stone sees media moving ever closer to the future predicted by the Max Headroom TV show of the 80s, which invented the idea of the “blipvert”: a high-intensity TV commercial that condensed high volumes of visual information into a few seconds (occasionally causing the viewer’s head to explode).
With video mixing, he points out, the rate of video is 30 frames per second, as opposed to a traditional piece of art with just one frame. “Video is mesmerizing,” he says. “People are drawn to movement.”
In experimenting with video clips, scobot says he constantly finds strange relationships in the organic nature of movement and music. “You start to notice that if you just build stuff with a rhythm, eventually it syncs up to the beat,” he says. “Your brain can accept a lot. It is filling in connections that may or may not be there. If you get commissioned to play in a club where you don’t know what the music is going to be and you have to plan something, it’s funny how often it syncs up.”
Strangely often, he says, a person’s gestures in a film clip will exactly match to 120 beats per minute—the tempo known in electronic music as “house.” Gene Kelly swinging an arm, or Buster Keaton performing a fall, for example, can both be clipped out, repeated, and scratched back and forth to this beat with startling consistency.
Subgenres also exist, with aficionados of abstract geometric forms, like James, departing from those like scobot and Stone who play with pop culture references and other reapplied content.
“With video at your disposal, and all the things you can do with light and sound, you have a lot of power at your fingertips,” Stone says. “I’m frankly surprised it hasn’t blown up quicker, with more excitement.”
On one of his tours with KMFDM, Stone and the band’s lighting manager worked in tandem, and heard reports that they put at least one person into a seizure from the intensity—an accomplishment they were slightly proud of.
While today VJs are often considered an added expense to a production budget, Stone, for one, thinks the addition is worthwhile.
“The VJ is that extra person that takes the building to the limit,” he says. “A VJ you like can take you on a wild trip.”
Still Images from VJ Composition
911 Media Arts Center will screen Video Out (2005), a feature documentary about the worldwide VJ scene, at “VJ Night” on September 20.
LEARN TO VJ: Every Saturday this fall, VJ scobot teaches a VJ workshop at 911 Media Arts Center. Contact vjscobot@scobot.com for details.
