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The term "VJ" kind of came about sort of towards the end of the 90s
In the early days it was much more about moving wallpaper in a club.
And it was very dumbed down and seen as secondary.
My name is Tolli. And I'm Graham, and we're Addictive TV from London. We're an audiovisual act.
We produce everything you kind of see and hear is our own kind of work. Or remixes.
My name's Chris Allen. I'm the founder and director of Light Surgeons. \ So, the Light Surgeons are a collective
and it really just kind of came about quite organically through a collective interest
in experimenting with projection.
My name's Oli Sorenson and I'm promoting the event tonight and it's an event called AV Social
and it's in collaboration with Look-n-Listen.
Hi, I'm Alex Wright. I'm part of FataMorgana, a visual sort of loose collective that I started three years ago.
We started off doing purely analog VJing and working with super 8 film and other live-camera-based mediums
and kind of expanded it now to writing our own VJ software.
We are Vector Meldrew and we VJ predominantly, but we also do lots of other work in TV and broadcast
and I work a lot in graphic design, animation and motion graphics.
Hi, I'm Michael Faulkner and I'm from an organization called D-Fuse. D-Fuse is a small group of artists who
(sort of background) started in club culture and VJing and we sort of moved more into live cinema.
We are Hexstatic. We produce audiovisual works and perform audiovisual shows around the globe.
VJing is trying to make a visual representation of the music that's being played at the time.
VJ culture is audio, video imagery and an audience. They're the three factors.
It's kind of like supporting the whole remixing thing, you know... getting something and cutting it up,
and just getting people in a club to see it, you know? It's just about, you go out to a club
to listen to music and kind of get immersed in the sound and it's just another kind of sense
that you can immerse yourself in, really.
In terms of simplifying what it is, I guess it would be
the manipulation of moving image or time-based media in a live context.
a strong theme of it is trying to get away from the traditional format of cinema
where it's filmed, edited and then screened.
It can be all things, I think. It can be both. It depends what's being shown.
I think that AV particularly, particularly what we do,
where it's all very much the audio and video are very combined.
I think it's both art and entertainment.
Is it an art form? I would say, for sure. I have quite a broad understanding of what art is, really.
I think art can be pretty much anything you want it to be at the end of the day. It is entertainment.
It takes all sorts of forms.
It's a bit of both, I mean, it's a bit of everything. It depends really what you want to make of it.
Well, for us it's the ultimate merging of audio and video to produce an entertaining product or performance.
It's my personal belief that anything that anyone considers to be art can be art.
But I think a lot of VJing, you'd be hard pressed to find much artistic merit, you know,
especially in the more commercial clubs that are based around just sexy imagery.
VJing in a club was actually opening our art to an audience that would probably never go to a gallery.
It's been quite an ongoing thing since the late 80s.
There have been video artists that go in the gallery, they go in somewhere else...
So we feed all these different angles of culture, of creativity, you know, not just entertainment or art.
And it moves so fast that we don't really have time to define it. We don't have time to say what it is.
I think the point is - what are the key influences of VJing?
I think it's always perceived as the club culture thing,
but I think that club culture is the avenue to be able to do it.
I would say in a film sense and in a visual sense, there's a hell of a lot of things
that have influenced it. You can trace the roots of experimental film and avant-garde film
back to the beginning of cinema, really.
In 1960s' America there was a big movement called "expanded cinema. They started using film in those big planetariums
and tried to blow up the frame of cinema using film in different contexts than just in a black box.
Expanded cinema, people from the 60s and 70s, tried to break away from the conventional forms of filmmaking.
Andy Warhol, who did live productions of more like film projections
behind live performances of Velvet Underground.
So that was kind of almost the first time we saw film and live music being put together. It was pretty much the first, and it was very inspiring.
Playing around with creating a film at the process of projection, rather than the process of filming.
We're not really inspired so much by cinema; we're more inspired by listening to music
and trying in a way to visualize it. And maybe even relating to the culture around the music
or the imagery it creates.
I would say that music has definitely shaped live performance, audiovisual culture massively.
It has been quite a sort of direct reflection of what has been going on
with other art forms and sample culture, subculture, sort of an extension of that into the new mediums.
The whole rave movement, that was very much where VJing got its name. VJ culture was kind of just exploding
and VJing went kind of on the tail end of that. It didn't go in commercial success as much as DJing went,
but it's still kind of doing its own thing, and it's very much been part of underground culture.
I think the context of where this work gets shown is very important,
and it does change how it's consumed by the audience.
Particularly with our work, we could actually do exactly the same thing that is in what people might define
as an entertainment kind of area or space, like in a huge kind of night club, and we'll play exactly the same thing
in some kind of museum somewhere, of contemporary arts or something, and people will see it
in a completely different light.
Well, it's crossed over into clubs and festivals pretty well known.
Obviously, commonly the common place for VJs is clubs, festivals or music events. Then, obviously, you've got
other people taking it outside of that context and doing it on buildings
or anywhere they find that they can set a projector up.
I think VJing is equally valid in a nightclub or a festival as it is in an art gallery.
Obviously, as soon as you put it in an art gallery, then the expectations for the artistic merit of it is
completely altered to when it's just cool moving images in a nightclub.
Maybe I'm idealistic, but I do believe that art does change the world.
Whichever way it's used, again on the content side, and how it's shown and what somebody does with it.
I think that's the beauty of video and sound together. You can really make people think about stuff
without having to sort of ram it down their throats.
If you look at Timber by ColdCut & Hexstatic,
that was like an AV thing that was made about the rainforest.
It's all together, and it's done like that
and that's cool, man.
'cause it's like, it's your own thing, but don't just come to a *** club with a drum-n-bass and just show this kind of staff -
starving African kids or something, and make people change their political views. That's not what it's about.
People try to bring politics into it too much. And it's just like, no, man.
Let's just go out and listen to some cool music, look at some cool visuals.
How we see doing stuff is making pieces that actually show information in a different way.
I'd say it's the perfect art form to represent the 21st century.
Art was always redundant technology. As soon as there was a new technology, for example painting and photography,
as soon as photography came around, it was like painting was accepted as art.
Simply because it's still emerging. It's still a kind of new form.
Because in a way it's used redundant technology - only really artists do that,
to express themselves in various ways.
It is built on everything culturally that has gone before.
Because it encompasses all mediums and effects like no other. �