What's in a name? That which we call a VJ

In an interview with Eduardo Kac, Nam June Paik, Korean-born American artist, considered to be the first video artist, stated that the relationship between art and new technology is as old as art. He considered the Egyptian Pyramids as the combination of high art and high tech. There will always be visionaries in the artistic endeavors incorporating new technology of his or her times. MTV’s approach to image and music is interesting and popularized “visual music” in the entertainment culture. Nam June Paik give credits to artist like Laurie Anderson, a fine artist, performer, musician whose multimedia work has been a catalyst bridging high culture and popular culture. He claimed that the new technology of today can be and will be used artistically in two basic ways: in the fine arts and in the applied arts, and the line is blurred. The VJ community is divided into two basic groups. The artistic VJ, who typically does not call him or herself a VJ, but prefers the term media artist, practicing in the realm of fine arts, and the club VJs who traditionally have played second fiddle to the DJ’s in the club culture. There is a rift emerging between the traditional VJs and the new breed of media artists.

As I read many of the essays from Vague Terrain, an appropriate title, I am intrigued by the theoretical and philosophical discourse surrounding the real-time audiovisual performance. VJ or Veejay is a derivative term from DJ or deejay. The meaning of VJing has changed from individuals hired as TV hosts presenting music videos on MTV of the early eighties to media artists in real-time mixing sounds, visuals, light, audience and space at present. The definitions are as varied as the individual performers themselves. VJing incorporates many more practices than just video mixing; furthermore, wanting to be seen as representing modernity, art and style in the 21^st century by the practitioners themselves. In her essay, VJ Theory, Ana Carvalho writes, “The term visual performer, describes practitioners working in live cinema, interactive installations, gallery performances, guerrilla interventions and club performances.” Words like hybridity and crossovers are often associated with the practice. In other words, the performers or practitioners are typically multi-disciplinary, non-conforming and working outside of the box. Looping through cyberspace at times, they see themselves on the cutting edge of mixing art and technology at a time when cultural materials have never been as readily available to the general public as it is now with the help of the almighty Internet, the network of networks. Like any emerging artistic endeavor, media artists’ practice is being defined and challenged at the same time. In his article, Last night a video band killed my DJ, Ryan Stec writes, “Currently, VJs have an exceptional collective knowledge of technology and have developed a clear understanding of how to augment the sonic experience for the audience. What is struggling to be understood is our role within the performance and how we might become the performance itself?”

Why the struggle? Ryan Stec again asks the question, “How does a VJ cultivate this performance side of his or her work? The more important question is whether the VJ, media artist, wants to dominate the live cinema that engages vs. allowing the audience to consume the experience. In the latter case, performance then takes on the “wallpaper” dilemma. Michael Betancourt examines the fine line between wallpaper visualizations vs. performance practice in Wallpaper And/as Art. Context is crucial. When a VJ performance or live cinema is set in a gallery/theater, it engages the audience and is customarily viewed as art. In the club setting, a non-art venue, VJ performances takes a back seat. The audio-visual mix on screen, however artistic it may be, becomes a “wallpaper” visual experience. The audience dominates and consumes the performance. There seems to be a real need on the media artist’s part wanting recognition for their techno skills. No doubt that artistic and technical expertise are required on the VJ or media artist’s part during their unique real-time performance. I suppose aside from creating Cubism, Picasso should also have demanded recognition for his brushwork. The need for many VJs wanting to establish themselves as performance artists because of their ability to maneuver electronic equipments seems superfluous.

Michael Betancourt writes, “Art can be transformed into wall paper, just as wallpaper can be transformed into art.” Although, the club VJ often considered second fiddle to the DJ, is very much like a film director, stays behind the scenes. The focal point of the VJing is the screen as it should be since the goal is to create synaesthesia, where the audience is engrossed in the totality of a sensory experience. Carrie Gates states, “The senses are enveloped and the mind is tantalized into a world being spun into existence on the spot. Perhaps it is this feeling of immediacy and immersion that is so rewarding for performers and audiences alike. Perhaps it is the intense bombardment of the senses that does it. Or perhaps it is the richness of the dialogue between technology, spatial architecture, and human expression that speaks to us so powerfully.”

This brings me to the introduction of VDMX by David Fodel. The software is amazing. The limitless potential of mixing audio and video is absolutely overwhelming. For any artists who might have the slightest inkling of wanting to work in time-based medium, it is like having a magic wand creating amazing humanly impossible special effects. The danger is that sometimes, the results obtained from manipulating software can be so far fetched and detached from reality that I wonder if we are really gaining anything? Just because we have unlimited access to technology, technology does not create artists. Is the latest thing always the best thing? Are we just blindly following fashion trends regardless of our body shapes? By overly depending on electronic devices, we are sacrificing our sensibilities as artists. In 1983, MTV was criticized for feeding its zombie-like viewers with endless doses of sugarcoated mindless garbage. MTV has greatly reduced its overall rotation of music video because of the Internet, the void I believe, has been taken up by a good portion of arbitrary art seen on the net.

In contrast to arbitrarily composed work, I enjoyed viewing professor Phil Solomon’s experimental video mixing gaming software and cinema. He is less concerned with the performance aspect but more interested in engaging the audience to experience his creation as he intends. His observation of the new paradigm, “the world is full of one-liners, superficial and immediate” is thought provoking. How do we balance the ease and the immediacy with which vast interactive materials are at ones fingertip, linking otherwise disconnected cultural data, and to transform and create work that is fluid, interconnected and relative, is hopefully the goal of every artist no matter the medium.

Open Works

In any artwork, “We see it as the end product of an author’s effort to arrange a sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author.” The advantages are many. It suggests, emotes, stimulates, provokes, questions, enlightens and most importantly engages the addressee in interplay with the work. “A work of art is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole. While at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.” Zen garden is the epitome of “open content” or “open source”. It devises no solutions, yet invites contemplation. The infinite poetic emptiness is at the very core of the finite placement and composition of trees, rocks and sand. It is a living landscape transforming through the seasons; a manifestation of the cyclic existence of all things as is in perfection.

For the contemporary artist, “openness” is and should be fundamental to remix culture in general and the consumer culture at large. We create; consume and recreate or remix. The cycle goes on endlessly generation after generation, and it is the essential process of culture making. Culture is inherently public domain; it cannot be bought or traded like commodity. It is an ever-evolving entity that anyone can claim as their own yet can never be owned. It is therefore in our best interest to restrict rights to its ownership. Remix culture at its best is operated on an honor system. It requires integrity, and honesty. While rules and restrictions are well intended, they are enforced to regulate the few rotten apples that spoil the bunch. More importantly, they are blindly enforced to ensure the profits reaped from cultural icons, i.e. Mickey Mouse. From an article published by Techdirt, “Last week, we reported on Rep. Zoe Lofgren's statement that copyright law has become equal to the life of Mickey Mouse…Mickey and Disney have been huge drivers of this attempt to stifle new culture, all in the name of limiting competition for itself. What a shame.” Has anyone challenged Disney for their convenient “copyleft” use of fairy tales collected from a variety of sources by which they have built their fantasy empire on “happily ever after?”

Copyright in cyberspace?

From a material space where tangible properties such as books, paintings, sculptures and music scores are abundant and heavily regulated by copyright laws, it is still much easier to regulate those than to control the intangible free flow of information that is happening at the speed of lightening in cyberspace. Much falls through the cracks of virtual space. The sensible people, well educated in some of the best universities in the country are promoting extreme regulations for creators of the cyberspace. Lawrence Lessig, professor of law and co-founder of Creative Commons challenges, “While writers with words have had the freedom to quote since time immemorial, “writers” with digital technology have not yet earned this right… There’s a copyright war going on in cyberspace. The peer-to-peer sharing is the enemy and the creators are the collateral damage.” Creativity will go on with or without copyright law enforcement. Each generation is inspired to create with the tools of its time, and will create in ways outside of the previous generation’s wildest imagination. “It should be encouraged and “properly balanced” writes Lessig, a difficult task to advocate however. Copyright, in Lessig’s view, is the most inefficient property system known to men. It is triggered every time there is a copy, and by default, every use of a creative work produces a “copy” in the digital world. Enforcing copyright law in cyberspace is as ridiculous as regulating breathing. So why do we enforce copyright law? It all boils down to begetting profit from creative endeavors. It is profit gaining not profit sharing in a consumer culture within the capitalistic state of mind. However, this is not to suggest any other state of mind would be problem free.

What about an artist's labor?

Photographer Hank Willis Thomas claims that he never learned to paint or draw. He humbly says, “All I could do was take pictures.” When he was working on his project, “Unbranded” and did a lot of retouching, but had to hire a retoucher when crunch time came. He remarks, “I encountered this conundrum where, for the first time, I was making this whole series of work that I didn’t make. That was really a scar on my photographer’s ego to be using other people’s photographs to make my art… The art in it was to recognize that by removing the branding from the image, that you could recognize what was really being sold. That’s why I say truth is better than fiction, because I didn’t own it.” He admits that his ego was scared; he was honest to give credit to the people who worked in collaboration with him to bring a vision to fruition where the result is raising awareness in the general public. As the cliché goes, “No man is an island,” he is often in the role of an art director, brainstorming, and transforming ideas with people in the corporate commerce who are not necessarily artists, collaborating in the process of making art for the sake of art, “Hank Willis Thomas’s vision”, that may or may not sell, yet it is making social commentary and is beyond commerce value. His art occupies a space that is neither commerce nor industry, yet by appropriating from both, his work is contemporary, and relevant.

His photographic series, B®ANDED, investigates the social and cultural ambiguity underlying the African American male, experiencing corporate exploitation, making apparent the tension between commodity and race. He remixes familiar consumer products and images, reconfigures to question social conscience and awareness on issues that plagues our contemporary society. The photograph taken at the funeral of his cousin, age 27, killed in a senseless petty robbery combined with text appropriated from a MasterCard ad campaign, Priceless #1, is poignant and heartfelt.

Remixed example: Jazz

I have always enjoyed looking at the motifs of Henri Matisse. They are bold, vibrant, whimsical, and full of spirit. So, working on an animation using the cutout and silhouette method, I had the idea of combining some of my lithographic prints as backdrops and bringing Matisse’s cutouts to life. It is an obvious appropriation, yet, viewed from a different perspective with the addition of sound and movement.

Guy Debord

I thoroughly enjoyed our webspinna performances last week. There was remixing at many levels, words, phrases, sounds, and music, individual as well as class performance all rolled into one smooth fusion. I have no background in sound art besides playing the piano. I have always been in awe of composers wondering how they hear sounds as I see colors and images in creating visual work. I dabbled in animation last semester, where for the first time, I selected music and sounds off of the Internet composing tracks for my shorts. Thanks to the sound artists on the net. I totally loved the mixing of different medium and was able to create a psychological space for the visuals. Working on the webspinna furthered my awareness of the abundant sources that are floating in cyberspace.

“All aware people of our time agree that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as an activity of compensation to which one could honorable devote oneself. The cause of this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life.” Writes Debord in his Methods of Détournement, an essay that was published in 1956. I wonder what he would write about on the current status of our global, techno-manic societies of the 21^st century? Would he embrace or reject the abundance of information, everywhere and anywhere? What would Debord think of the net artists, drifting in and out of virtual realities mixing and remixing, creating art instantaneously, spontaneously as art can be? How was art ever justified as a superior activity and why?

On the other hand, détournement, much like the cut-up method, certainly works well with the endless supply of resources. Anything can be and should be used. Debord stated, “Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations.” He goes on further, “It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression.” This statement can be used as a metaphor to describe dualism. When opposites are juxtaposed, the total meaning transcends.

In Postproduction, by Nicolas Bourriaud, he quoted Douglas Huebler saying in the sixties, “The world is saturated with objects and he did not wish to produce more.” Bourriaud also used the word “chaos” a few times describing the excessiveness of our society. There is so much of everything, objects, noise, pollution, electronic messaging, etc. The artists of today have an organizing task at hand, recycling, remixing, and making sense out of the nonsense. We’re honing our skills in discretion.

The web, the virtual space with its matrix, has replaced the psychogeographical maps. What Debord termed dérive, “drift”, as the most important strategy for raising awareness of the urban landscape, we now “surf” the waves of the matrix, drifting in and out of virtual realities. What is reality?

To have a television once was a luxury. Now, having multiple sets in one household is commonplace not to mention the social isolation as its byproduct. “The spectacle reunites the separated, but reunites it as separated,” once again social alienation starting at the very basic level of the family unit. What kind of a society are we creating? Debord was concerned with effects of television, mass media, and capitalistic consumerism on society as a whole in the late fifties. “All that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” The spectacle. “To the degree that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of enchained modern society which ultimately expresses only its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of this sleep.”-Debord

These are my thoughts on an array of large topics, I look forward to our discussion in class.

sound mix

www.soundtoys.net/toys/3d-gamelan (bells)

www.soundtoys.net/toys/infrasonic-soundscape (radar)

www.soundtoys.net/toys/pattern-chain-internet-instrument (keyboard)

www.soundtoys.net/toys/iridescent-sound (iridescent)

http://www.soundtoys.net/toys/vds-virtual-drum-skin (drums)

http://inbflat.net/ (instrumental)

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13624 (poetry – female ogan)

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13633 Poetry – david scott

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13628 Poetry – loss - david scott

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13625 Poetry – david scott

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=13626 Poetry – david scott

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=46415 (dramatic piano)

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=12692 (movement in C)

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/dial/The-Dial-A-Poem-Poets_18_coolidge.mp3 (objects)

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/extended_voices/Extended-Voices_4_Robert-Ashley.mp3 (she was a visitor)

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/extended_voices/Extended-Voices_7_Morton-Feldman.mp3 (christian wolff in cambridge)

OM

My formative years were spent in Taipei, Taiwan and the family immigrated to the US in my teens. Growing up on two continents, I realize often that my ideas and beliefs are very much mixed. Contradictions exist between the interior and exterior selves; however, the advantage of experiencing two strikingly different cultures outweighs the differences, opposite extract. Mixing of cultures yields the best of worlds more often than not. Mixing English and Chinese while conversing with my parents and siblings happens often. The speech might seem schizophrenic to a listener, yet, this is how it is, all mixed up, and it just flows.

“Language,” William S. Burroughs first reminded us, “is a virus from outer space.” “You know, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as TV. I mean, they just keep showing you the same pictures, over and over and over. And when they talk, they just make sounds. They more or less synch up their lips, that’s what I think.” Lyrics from “Language is a Virus”, one of my favorites among many that Laurie Anderson performed during her 1984 Home of the Brave concert in San Francisco. Her multi-media remix left a deep impression in my being. Now, the same phrase reappears as I read Paul D Miller’s “Rhythm Science”, is it synchronicity? Let’s put a spin on it, I’m on a loop looking for meaning. Is there meaning in anything? Most of the time, most things are meaningless, but that is exactly the point, the meaningless is the meaning. We are all spinning in circles endlessly. You get my drift.

Miller writes, “The beginning. That’s the hard part. Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out.” We are certain of the uncertainties. Is there a beginning or an end? “The ten thousand things are produced and reproduced so that variation and transformation have no end”, from the book, Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained, written by Zhou Dunyi, a Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher and cosmologist. He was concerned with the relationship between human conduct and the universal forces in the 11^th century. This infinite space we called the universe, the site of all sources and resources. If we are on a loop, we just step into the loop at any given point at birth, ride the roller coaster of life, fall off the loop at the time of death. Along the Milky Way, we mix and remix all that we come into contact with, there’s always the next generation picking up where we left off, the variation and transformation have no end. Endlessly mixing.

Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, conceptual artist, is mixing technology and art, creating endless variations of sonic sculptures. Welcoming the constant bombardment of information, sound, objects of this 21^st century, incorporating all styles of music, breaking patterns, loops, and transforming rhythms into new dimensions, fraying the lines that holds the present and the future, embracing diversity as a basic way of life. He is mixing it all up, cultural ideas, algorithms of everyday life, patterns, and repetitions digitally, globally, and universally through the cyberspace. If one can visualize the Internet, this web like structure, we would see all the electrons firing at any given moment in time; it would be the ultimate firework show ever put on display, a continuous finally. This is the century of hyper-acceleration, from now to the beginning, it is a record spinning, endlessly. You get my drift.

In regards to the 21^st century, the century of hyper-acceleration, I can’t help but wonder how technology affects the human psyche as a whole. Every human being is encapsulated in a physical shell; the only way to relate to one another and the environment is through means of communication via the five senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. In this techno manic society of ours, there are true advances that challenge our sight and hearing; however, at the same time, it is retarding our taste, smell and touch as human beings. I think this imbalance can or might already have brought serious damages in our survival as a specie. With the gamut of techno gadgets one can accumulate, one never has to leave ones home as long as we are attached to our I-pod, I-phone, Nano and laptop computers. Yes, we are thoroughly connected wirelessly in cyberspace; yet the people closest to us seem like strangers. Internet is at our fingertips; do we recognize the faces of those who are near? Or does one need to invite them as friends on Facebook in order to connect and to relate?

In closing, I’d like to quote a passage from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, “Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices-the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: OM-perfection.”

The cut-up method(s)

I have not heard of the name Kathy Acker; and only have made her acquaintances reading the novel, Blood and Guts in High School. Unfamiliar with literary techniques, I can best describe what I encountered with the term, collage in the visual arts as her writing style. Almost parallel to the collage method of cutting up and layering of images and colors, her novel begins with a collection of sketches, dialogues, dairy entries of Janey, a ten-year old misfit. The colorful use of language is pornographic in tone and honest in nature reflecting her rebellious and personal experiences. Remixes languages of punk through voices of Hawthorne’s Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, in The Scarlet Letter, addressing the age-old male female power struggle for dominance, the gender politics. Contrasting the nihilistic attitudes of the punk culture with the 17^th century Puritan Boston. I quote from an interview with R.U. Sirius, “She uses appropriation, multiple points-of-ego, multiple points-in-time.” I find on page 99 - 100, the passage in her novel that reflects Burroughs’ cut-up method, beginning with “In this society there was a woman… “ And ends with “going out as far as possible in freedom,” The cut-up method is poeticaly poignant.

I don’t know if this is a literary style or technique? When I read her book, I feel as if I am reading her “body language”, explicit, graphic and violent with no inhibition what so ever. Her "body language" knows no boundaries, yet connecting with the reader at its most primal level. Reading her novel reminds me of watching David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet.

I couldn’t agree more with the passage in William S. Burroughs, “The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit— all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this point—had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.” “It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter.”

I will have to assume that some of the best visual work is created by accident as well. To this literary term “cut-up” method, I’d like to quote a passage from my year-end review statement:

Synopsis of First Year MFA-Printmaking

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

The quote is by the French poet, essayist and philosopher, Paul Valery. It is the title of a book about artist Robert Irwin. Knowing intuitively that it resonated with me, I have been contemplating its meaning; how it relates to my thinking and studio practice.

Reality for me lies in ambiguity, neither wholly representational nor totally abstract. As much as I want to capture what I see, I need to make marks spontaneously fueled by emotions with textures and patterns. I am using the word, abstract, as a verb rather than a style. Fragmenting and re-grouping, re-contextualizing the relationship between the whole and parts, deconstructing ways of seeing what was once familiar evoke further examination of reality.

Day-to-day reality seems to happen in an orderly fashion, we move THROUGH plans MADE IN ADVANCE. Yet, things rarely happen according to plans. In fact, IF we allow ourselves to be open to spontaneity, we just may have increased our chance of creating our magnum opus.

I found this link of Kathy Acker's recording of "President Bush".

Lydia - Borges and I remix

It is to that other one, to Lydia, things are. I wander through the streets of China and America and I pause, one could say curiously, to gaze at others; of Lydia I receive news from my weekly telephone conversations with mother and I hear her name mentioned in her random conversations with distant relatives. I like Chinese calligraphy, Japanese flair, American vintage pottery of the thirties and forties, fabric with textures, modern architecture, the taste of coffee, the novels of Hermann Hesse and the films of Akira Kurosawa; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into attributes of a versatile amateur. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is ambiguous; I exist, I let myself exist so that Lydia may live her life in pursue of the arts, and this pursuit justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that she has put together some decent creations, yet these creations cannot sustain me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to humanity. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to exist in the other. Little by little, I surrender willingly to her everything, even though I am aware of her steadfast tendency to wander.

The Zen masters understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Lydia, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in her creations than in those of many others, or in the incessant questioning of my mind. Long ago I tried to free myself from her by moving on from the mythologies of body and spirit to quarry of duality, but those are now Lydia’s and I will have to conceive of other things. In this way, my life is vanishing and all that I am (if it is that I am someone) is infinitesimal, or has become the other.

I question which of us is writing this piece.