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.