stefango
24th March 2003, 09:25 PM
Here is the text of the VJ article from SFBG... Several people have asked for the text as they had trouble finding this article online...
Stefan G
Projected art in clubland.
By Amanda Scotese
THE SCREEN BEHIND J Boogie at the DNA Lounge flashes
images of a computer-rendered woman, minimalist robots
and robot parts circa 1983. J Boogie tweaks the
distortion on a dark and droning, Blondie-esque track.
A few blinks of an eye go by. Thin skeletons of
squares flicker, little bubbles bounce, waves of
contrasting colors melt, and the fractured
emergency-broadcast-system bands of color slide by
like an assembly-line belt. Square doubles of the
picture flash next to one another, making the drunk
kids see straight for a minute as they await a set by
DJ Krush. No one has their eyes on Devon Simunovich,
though he's the man behind the visuals, the one mixing
the images live from his laptop and projecting them
onto the screen.
While it's hard to say what the crowd makes of the eye
candy on the wall, such imagery, produced by live
video artists, or VJs, has become a staple of San
Francisco club life, from fake-booby, pumped-muscle
house music soirees to rump-shaking electro-break
freak-outs. VJs may soon be as common as bartenders,
bouncers, beautiful people, sleazy-eyed wallflowers ?
and DJs.
Projected visuals are now standard for megaclubs in
most large, international cities, but nowhere in this
country, beyond the borders of the Bay Area, has seen
such a proliferation of video artists who mix to music
in nightclubs. Nowhere else has there been a Video
Riot, where more than 70 video virtuosos splattered
their art onto the 200-foot outer wall of a downtown
building. Nowhere else does a community of visual
artists get together each month for a Video Salon,
where VJs learn the latest in video and VJ technology
and check out one another's transient, projected
paintings.
Production companies with their own live VJs ? such as
Blasthaus, Dimension 7 (D7), Eyephunk, Trouble, Punch
Presents, and 47 ? call San Francisco home. So does
Electronica Optica, one of the only distribution
outlets for visual content made especially for VJs,
which produces VJTV, a public access program that
covers VJ culture and appears in six U.S. cities.
It's not surprising that San Francisco reigns as a
Holy Mama of club visuals, given its history as a
center of technology, music, and people working
artistically under the influence of massive quantities
of drugs. The hippies helped, as did the ravers. Even
the technology boom and bust has made its contribution
in ways both straightforward and serendipitous. Live
projected art at parties originated here in the '60s,
and it has flowered into a worldwide cultural and
artistic phenomenon.
Let there be light
One day in 1952, more than a decade before the hippie
movement took off, a professor named Seymour Locks
from what was then San Francisco State College showed
a conference of art educators a new technique.
Swirling paints in a glass dish over the beam of an
overhead projector as a jazz group improvised, Locks
introduced, in essence, the concept of a moving
painting ? and an art form that would soon provide the
wallpaper for many a far-out, acid-fried, rock 'n'
roll party.
Locks took the show down to Los Angeles, where it
quickly broke up. But the last performance piqued the
interest of an art student named Elias Romero.
Adopting the technique, Romero brought it to the
underground, first showing his projections with a
percussionist in the beat colony of L.A., then moving
up to San Francisco in 1962, where his shows popped
the live-visual cherries of parties, galleries, and
coffeehouses. Romero passed the word on to other eager
artists, who experimented with oils, inks, and
household chemicals that, when mixed together, created
groovy effects.
By that time, earnest folk musicians were turning into
plugged-in rockers, and San Francisco love children
were turning on to acid, free lovin', and rock 'n'
roll ? prime ingredients for dance parties with
psychedelic light shows. It was a hippie named Bill
Ham who beefed up the oily imagery by using multiple
projectors, causing richly colored, amorphic shapes to
melt over one another. He took his light show to the
Avalon Ballroom, where he manipulated the forms by
hand to shake and shimmy in time with the music.
For years artists like Ham had the run of loft parties
and ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon, using
oil projections, strobe lights, ultraviolet lights
with Day-Glo paint, and images from slides or films to
put on extravagant shows ? considered an essential
element of any lysergic acid-friendly space of sensory
stimulation.
Eventually, however, the hippie heyday ended, followed
by disco, with its automated lighting systems that
spun and flashed in sync with the music. Then came the
'80s. Avalanches occurred on mountains of coke,
digital technology surged in San Francisco, and the
music video gained popularity. With the emergence of
MTV and an amazing new thing called a video cassette
recorder, a full video revolution was in effect.
Chichi dance clubs grabbed onto the trend, and the
live VJ was born.
VJs performed live, using content recorded on VCRs and
old mixers from television stations. The epicenter was
New York, with all of its hip superclubs, but the
trend returned home to San Francisco with the use of
digital mixers for visuals at clubs. "The psychedelic
light show is having a high-tech rebirth at the
recently reopened Fillmore West in San Francisco," a
1986 Billboard article proclaimed.
Enter the late '80s, and a whole new generation of
kids seeking peace and love ? not to mention unity and
respect. San Francisco was the first U.S. city to join
the international rave family, and live visuals were
welcomed with open arms.
"Everybody was looking for
new ways to tickle people's brains,"
says Stefan G,
an SF based VJ who has worked in major dance clubs across
the world since 1978.
Perhaps all of the frenetic dance-floor action and the
positive vibes brought live visuals back into the
underground. Or, seeing as dancing and drugs are like
two unnaturally happy peas in a pod, maybe the use of
mind-altering substances inspired the reinstitution of
the full-on light show. Whatever the case, clubland
started taking interest again in live art that
interacted with the music coming through the speakers.
By the end of the '90s the economy had slowed down and
extravagant party productions were as common as
company trips to Tahoe. But there was more change to
come. The sinking ship of the dot-com economy was
bound to leave behind something worth scavenging ?
aside from slightly deflated rents and real estate
prices. In clubland 2000 the frenzied and desperate
sale of dot-com office equipment began to put VJ tools
in the hands of artists who couldn't quite bring
themselves to shell out a thousand-plus dollars for
store-bought projectors, mixers, and cameras. Add to
that technological advancements in video production
and a herd of techies out of work, and you've got a
flux of video artists crawling out of their computer
cubicles into the shadows of San Francisco's DJs.
The tools and the trade
While live visual artists have different ways of
relating to technology, the basic equipment they use
to create their fucked-up, hacked-apart mindscapes are
cameras, VCRs or DVD players, video mixers, and
laptops with video-editing programs. A video mixer,
which functions similarly to the DJ's audio mixer,
allows VJs to switch between sources. Like DJs, VJs
usually mix from two sources, then distort, tweak, and
speed them up. DJs mix records, and some VJs mix
borrowed content.
But the comparisons only go so far. For the VJ,
building a collection of content is not as easy as
walking down to the Lower Haight. Video artists may
spend days crafting seconds of content. They may shoot
it themselves, construct it with a computer-animation
or graphics program, or hunt down and digitize film
splices from vintage footage. It's a process more
comparable to that of the laptop musician ? they both
create and refine the content ahead of time, then
manipulate original work and samples via laptops
during the show, fashioning a bombardment of shifting
sensory layers.
While lots of VJs rely on campy, computer-generated
visuals like flowers and Buddhas, usually rotten
leftovers from the rave years, many visual artists are
employing distinctive methods to create imagery
capable of beguiling crowds of all kinds ? Haight
Street hippies, electro fashionistas, art snobs, or
jaded indie hipsters.
When Simunovich, one of Blasthaus's primary video
artists, mixed his visuals at the DNA show, fading in
and out between his laptop and a DVD player, the
laptop was often mixing sources within itself,
resulting in disparate forms churning, splicing, and
flickering all at once, then disappearing. His source
material varied ? animated old-school computer
drawings like the Weird Science-esque female, his own
still computer graphics, found footage, and in an
homage to his colleagues, work by other San Francisco
video artists.
One of the artists whose work he used, Scott Pagano,
is manipulator extraordinaire of spliced-up
architectural images. Pagano gathers his content by
shooting cityscapes with his camera, attaching a
microlens to capture the textures of common objects,
and digging through archives for old reels from
instructional shorts, commercials, and movies. For his
live performances ? with Trouble, Eyephunk, and
artists on Tigerbeat6 Records ? he selects content and
mixes it on his laptop, sometimes adding the outside
source of a tiny surveillance camera and recording the
musician live. His style is urban and mechanical,
characterized by panels of slowly panning windows and
flickering geometric shapes that create warped,
disorienting patterns.
Sue Costabile of Orthlorng Musork has conceived of an
innovative technique harking back to the clunky
overhead projectors of the '60s. Instead of an
overhead, though, she places a small Web-conferencing
camera over a light pad usually used to view slides or
negatives. The camera captures her shaking, wrinkling,
and sliding papers, fabrics, photos, film cuts,
drawings, and paintings by hand, and the image is then
filtered through a software program for video, with
which Costabile can delay frames, overlap them, and
add effects. Her blurry washes of color and dramatic
sketches of black and white ? reminiscent of the
abstract expressionist paintings of Helen
Frankenthaler and Franz Kline, respectively ? are
cerebral and organic.
Environmentally conscious
While the visual displays by these artists are
stunning, they're not supposed to garner too much
attention from the inhabitants of the dance floor. If
their work becomes the focus of the party, people will
stop dancing and start staring ? which isn't what most
promotors and DJs want. The visuals are an additive to
the atmosphere, not the star of the show. They
contribute to the overall mood by interacting with the
club space, the viewers, and the music.
"I'm trying to collaborate with the whole space,"
Pagano says. "When people go out, they want to feel
like a space is really different than the one they're
in all the time. I think that adding those live moving
images into an environment often can do a lot to
transform a space into a more exotic architecture." In
other words, live visual artists can help clubgoers
immerse themselves in a fantasy world. "Visuals create
this kinetic motion that you'll always kind of see in
your peripheral," Simunovich explains. "That runs
throughout the whole delirium and energy of a dance
club."
Exploring the concept of immersion, many S.F. artists
have begun integrating nontraditional screens into the
club environment. These installations pull video out
of the 2-D realm of a square on the wall and into a
more interactive space. Grant Davis and John Schwark
of D7, the video production company and artist
collective that puts on the Video Salons, often design
spaces to create an all-encompassing visual
experience. One might contain multiple screens, many
of them three-dimensional or irregularly shaped,
rather than the standard flat rectangle. One screen
features 12 suspended circles aligned in a rectangle.
Another, a rotating cube made of translucent material,
is designed to create a three-dimensional illusion in
which an image projected onto two sides of the cube
bleeds through the material to the other sides,
resulting in a disorienting challenge to your depth
perception.
Stacey Van Buskirk, a.k.a. Girlie8, aligns multiple
translucent screens that emerge into the space at an
angle. Geometric images catch on each plane before
fading out and reemerging on the next, capturing
texture and depth. Van Buskirk, who often performs in
audiovisual collaboration with breakbeat-techno DJ
Anon (Ann Sitko), comes from a musical background and
says, "I sort of keep my musical head in my visual
world."
Matches made in electronic heaven
World-renowned for its electronic music scene, San
Francisco is a natural breeding ground for such
inspired collaborations between visual artists and
electronic musicians ? both VJs and laptop tweakers.
And some VJs take that idea quite literally: filtering
music into software programs that read the pitches and
beats of songs, they cause color-coded images to move
and flash in time with the rhythms. Other artists
switch their sources in relation to the beat or tweak
the colors to match the mood of the music.
"I do certain stuff like cutting on beats and
following rhythms," Pagano says. "I don't think you
can sustain that kind of work over a period of time,
but in driving parts of the music, it can add to the
rhythm to have the image on pulse with it. You
actually feel the music more."
Many VJs feel their work fits particularly well with a
certain genre. Costabile, who usually pairs up with
laptop artists like Wobbly and Kid 606, feels her
style complements both the ambient and the more
aggressive music of the progressive laptop scene. "I
think that a lot of the music I work with is textural
and that the images I make also have a lot of
different textures and layers," she says. Her bright
abstractions tick and streak during more hectic parts
of a song; during ambient, spatial moments the
textures fade in and out of focus, with rounded shapes
gently rolling across one another.
"The glitchy, syncopated aspect of tech-house,
electro, and breakbeats have the same tempo and feel
as I use in my video," Simunovich says. The vintage
electronic sounds and broken-down technological noises
in those genres of music parallel the imagery he likes
? old-school robotics, computers, video games,
disfunctional technology. "Those styles of music are
interested in the technologies that create the music
as well as the music itself," he adds.
And new genres of visual art projections have sprung
up in response to music that calls for particular
imagery and motion. Trance tends to be accompanied by
vibrant oranges and rich greens and purples in
computerized images of fractal geometry and what
Pagano describes as "pseudo-spiritual stuff." Drum 'n'
bass and hip-hop are likely to be matched with
pummeling, shadowy, angular, and urban pictures. House
gets trendy colors, cute flowers, and sexy animations.
Most visual art displays still accompany a DJ, but
some artists prefer to work with live performers, be
they laptop musicians like Wobbly or Kid 606 or a live
hip-hop act like Most Chill Slackmob. Costabile, whose
use of a live camera gives her cinematic performance a
human quality, like that of a live musician, says she
improvises with the music, since she can tangibly
react to it. She touches the source of the colors and
shapes with her hands and can intuitively react to it
by drawing and painting live.
Pagano also revels in the spontaneous nature of live
musicians. "There's something more inspiring about
doing live video with live musicians," he says.
"Unless it's a DJ who's really active ? because then
you get more inspired to get into the improvised
nature of the whole thing."
He sees parallels in the performances of laptop
musicians and video artists ? how they sample and mix.
"There's a lot of loop-based and repetitive stuff, and
there's also a lot of glitchy, weirdo, freaked-out
stuff, and those are all techniques that apply to
mucking around with video in a live setting really
well."
For Simunovich, if the synchronicity is there, it
doesn't matter whether you're collaborating with a DJ
or a live musician. The possibility for creative
outbursts can come through brainstorming before the
set or just completely improvising.
Visions
Live video is now so much a part of performance
culture that it accompanies almost any mainstream pop
show, from Eminem to Shania Twain (granted, it's
usually simple action shots of the live performance ?
live television for the unfortunate kids on the lawn).
In the commercial electronic music world, DJ-producers
Sasha and Digweed or Paul Oakenfold don't leave home
without their visualist. And with acts like Radiohead,
Gorillaz, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor integrating
live visuals into their performances, the art form is
bubbling up in the mainstream ? and even going back to
its rock and roll roots.
As visuals have gotten more common in the commercial
sphere, music equipment manufacturers have picked up
on the demand for more accessible means of producing
them. Software and hardware for the home user are in
the infancy stages, but soon, just as any 16-year-old
with a computer can produce electronic music tracks in
his or her bedroom, we'll all be able to play around
with video mixing. New technologies will project the
medium into unforeseeable forms ? like the new
TransScreens, which are completely transparent, so
that images appear to float ethereally in space, and
the Catalyst, a projector that slides and sways like
stage lights.
Things have changed since Locks first made his pretty
pictures with paint, a glass dish, and an overhead
projector. He probably couldn't have imagined his art
experiments would bring about visual projections at
acid tests, industrial warehouse parties, and the
Superbowl halftime show. And maybe VJs like
Simunovich, Costabile, Pagano, and Davis don't realize
that with each flicker of their moving art they are
making history ? nothing new for San Francisco.
Stefan G
Projected art in clubland.
By Amanda Scotese
THE SCREEN BEHIND J Boogie at the DNA Lounge flashes
images of a computer-rendered woman, minimalist robots
and robot parts circa 1983. J Boogie tweaks the
distortion on a dark and droning, Blondie-esque track.
A few blinks of an eye go by. Thin skeletons of
squares flicker, little bubbles bounce, waves of
contrasting colors melt, and the fractured
emergency-broadcast-system bands of color slide by
like an assembly-line belt. Square doubles of the
picture flash next to one another, making the drunk
kids see straight for a minute as they await a set by
DJ Krush. No one has their eyes on Devon Simunovich,
though he's the man behind the visuals, the one mixing
the images live from his laptop and projecting them
onto the screen.
While it's hard to say what the crowd makes of the eye
candy on the wall, such imagery, produced by live
video artists, or VJs, has become a staple of San
Francisco club life, from fake-booby, pumped-muscle
house music soirees to rump-shaking electro-break
freak-outs. VJs may soon be as common as bartenders,
bouncers, beautiful people, sleazy-eyed wallflowers ?
and DJs.
Projected visuals are now standard for megaclubs in
most large, international cities, but nowhere in this
country, beyond the borders of the Bay Area, has seen
such a proliferation of video artists who mix to music
in nightclubs. Nowhere else has there been a Video
Riot, where more than 70 video virtuosos splattered
their art onto the 200-foot outer wall of a downtown
building. Nowhere else does a community of visual
artists get together each month for a Video Salon,
where VJs learn the latest in video and VJ technology
and check out one another's transient, projected
paintings.
Production companies with their own live VJs ? such as
Blasthaus, Dimension 7 (D7), Eyephunk, Trouble, Punch
Presents, and 47 ? call San Francisco home. So does
Electronica Optica, one of the only distribution
outlets for visual content made especially for VJs,
which produces VJTV, a public access program that
covers VJ culture and appears in six U.S. cities.
It's not surprising that San Francisco reigns as a
Holy Mama of club visuals, given its history as a
center of technology, music, and people working
artistically under the influence of massive quantities
of drugs. The hippies helped, as did the ravers. Even
the technology boom and bust has made its contribution
in ways both straightforward and serendipitous. Live
projected art at parties originated here in the '60s,
and it has flowered into a worldwide cultural and
artistic phenomenon.
Let there be light
One day in 1952, more than a decade before the hippie
movement took off, a professor named Seymour Locks
from what was then San Francisco State College showed
a conference of art educators a new technique.
Swirling paints in a glass dish over the beam of an
overhead projector as a jazz group improvised, Locks
introduced, in essence, the concept of a moving
painting ? and an art form that would soon provide the
wallpaper for many a far-out, acid-fried, rock 'n'
roll party.
Locks took the show down to Los Angeles, where it
quickly broke up. But the last performance piqued the
interest of an art student named Elias Romero.
Adopting the technique, Romero brought it to the
underground, first showing his projections with a
percussionist in the beat colony of L.A., then moving
up to San Francisco in 1962, where his shows popped
the live-visual cherries of parties, galleries, and
coffeehouses. Romero passed the word on to other eager
artists, who experimented with oils, inks, and
household chemicals that, when mixed together, created
groovy effects.
By that time, earnest folk musicians were turning into
plugged-in rockers, and San Francisco love children
were turning on to acid, free lovin', and rock 'n'
roll ? prime ingredients for dance parties with
psychedelic light shows. It was a hippie named Bill
Ham who beefed up the oily imagery by using multiple
projectors, causing richly colored, amorphic shapes to
melt over one another. He took his light show to the
Avalon Ballroom, where he manipulated the forms by
hand to shake and shimmy in time with the music.
For years artists like Ham had the run of loft parties
and ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon, using
oil projections, strobe lights, ultraviolet lights
with Day-Glo paint, and images from slides or films to
put on extravagant shows ? considered an essential
element of any lysergic acid-friendly space of sensory
stimulation.
Eventually, however, the hippie heyday ended, followed
by disco, with its automated lighting systems that
spun and flashed in sync with the music. Then came the
'80s. Avalanches occurred on mountains of coke,
digital technology surged in San Francisco, and the
music video gained popularity. With the emergence of
MTV and an amazing new thing called a video cassette
recorder, a full video revolution was in effect.
Chichi dance clubs grabbed onto the trend, and the
live VJ was born.
VJs performed live, using content recorded on VCRs and
old mixers from television stations. The epicenter was
New York, with all of its hip superclubs, but the
trend returned home to San Francisco with the use of
digital mixers for visuals at clubs. "The psychedelic
light show is having a high-tech rebirth at the
recently reopened Fillmore West in San Francisco," a
1986 Billboard article proclaimed.
Enter the late '80s, and a whole new generation of
kids seeking peace and love ? not to mention unity and
respect. San Francisco was the first U.S. city to join
the international rave family, and live visuals were
welcomed with open arms.
"Everybody was looking for
new ways to tickle people's brains,"
says Stefan G,
an SF based VJ who has worked in major dance clubs across
the world since 1978.
Perhaps all of the frenetic dance-floor action and the
positive vibes brought live visuals back into the
underground. Or, seeing as dancing and drugs are like
two unnaturally happy peas in a pod, maybe the use of
mind-altering substances inspired the reinstitution of
the full-on light show. Whatever the case, clubland
started taking interest again in live art that
interacted with the music coming through the speakers.
By the end of the '90s the economy had slowed down and
extravagant party productions were as common as
company trips to Tahoe. But there was more change to
come. The sinking ship of the dot-com economy was
bound to leave behind something worth scavenging ?
aside from slightly deflated rents and real estate
prices. In clubland 2000 the frenzied and desperate
sale of dot-com office equipment began to put VJ tools
in the hands of artists who couldn't quite bring
themselves to shell out a thousand-plus dollars for
store-bought projectors, mixers, and cameras. Add to
that technological advancements in video production
and a herd of techies out of work, and you've got a
flux of video artists crawling out of their computer
cubicles into the shadows of San Francisco's DJs.
The tools and the trade
While live visual artists have different ways of
relating to technology, the basic equipment they use
to create their fucked-up, hacked-apart mindscapes are
cameras, VCRs or DVD players, video mixers, and
laptops with video-editing programs. A video mixer,
which functions similarly to the DJ's audio mixer,
allows VJs to switch between sources. Like DJs, VJs
usually mix from two sources, then distort, tweak, and
speed them up. DJs mix records, and some VJs mix
borrowed content.
But the comparisons only go so far. For the VJ,
building a collection of content is not as easy as
walking down to the Lower Haight. Video artists may
spend days crafting seconds of content. They may shoot
it themselves, construct it with a computer-animation
or graphics program, or hunt down and digitize film
splices from vintage footage. It's a process more
comparable to that of the laptop musician ? they both
create and refine the content ahead of time, then
manipulate original work and samples via laptops
during the show, fashioning a bombardment of shifting
sensory layers.
While lots of VJs rely on campy, computer-generated
visuals like flowers and Buddhas, usually rotten
leftovers from the rave years, many visual artists are
employing distinctive methods to create imagery
capable of beguiling crowds of all kinds ? Haight
Street hippies, electro fashionistas, art snobs, or
jaded indie hipsters.
When Simunovich, one of Blasthaus's primary video
artists, mixed his visuals at the DNA show, fading in
and out between his laptop and a DVD player, the
laptop was often mixing sources within itself,
resulting in disparate forms churning, splicing, and
flickering all at once, then disappearing. His source
material varied ? animated old-school computer
drawings like the Weird Science-esque female, his own
still computer graphics, found footage, and in an
homage to his colleagues, work by other San Francisco
video artists.
One of the artists whose work he used, Scott Pagano,
is manipulator extraordinaire of spliced-up
architectural images. Pagano gathers his content by
shooting cityscapes with his camera, attaching a
microlens to capture the textures of common objects,
and digging through archives for old reels from
instructional shorts, commercials, and movies. For his
live performances ? with Trouble, Eyephunk, and
artists on Tigerbeat6 Records ? he selects content and
mixes it on his laptop, sometimes adding the outside
source of a tiny surveillance camera and recording the
musician live. His style is urban and mechanical,
characterized by panels of slowly panning windows and
flickering geometric shapes that create warped,
disorienting patterns.
Sue Costabile of Orthlorng Musork has conceived of an
innovative technique harking back to the clunky
overhead projectors of the '60s. Instead of an
overhead, though, she places a small Web-conferencing
camera over a light pad usually used to view slides or
negatives. The camera captures her shaking, wrinkling,
and sliding papers, fabrics, photos, film cuts,
drawings, and paintings by hand, and the image is then
filtered through a software program for video, with
which Costabile can delay frames, overlap them, and
add effects. Her blurry washes of color and dramatic
sketches of black and white ? reminiscent of the
abstract expressionist paintings of Helen
Frankenthaler and Franz Kline, respectively ? are
cerebral and organic.
Environmentally conscious
While the visual displays by these artists are
stunning, they're not supposed to garner too much
attention from the inhabitants of the dance floor. If
their work becomes the focus of the party, people will
stop dancing and start staring ? which isn't what most
promotors and DJs want. The visuals are an additive to
the atmosphere, not the star of the show. They
contribute to the overall mood by interacting with the
club space, the viewers, and the music.
"I'm trying to collaborate with the whole space,"
Pagano says. "When people go out, they want to feel
like a space is really different than the one they're
in all the time. I think that adding those live moving
images into an environment often can do a lot to
transform a space into a more exotic architecture." In
other words, live visual artists can help clubgoers
immerse themselves in a fantasy world. "Visuals create
this kinetic motion that you'll always kind of see in
your peripheral," Simunovich explains. "That runs
throughout the whole delirium and energy of a dance
club."
Exploring the concept of immersion, many S.F. artists
have begun integrating nontraditional screens into the
club environment. These installations pull video out
of the 2-D realm of a square on the wall and into a
more interactive space. Grant Davis and John Schwark
of D7, the video production company and artist
collective that puts on the Video Salons, often design
spaces to create an all-encompassing visual
experience. One might contain multiple screens, many
of them three-dimensional or irregularly shaped,
rather than the standard flat rectangle. One screen
features 12 suspended circles aligned in a rectangle.
Another, a rotating cube made of translucent material,
is designed to create a three-dimensional illusion in
which an image projected onto two sides of the cube
bleeds through the material to the other sides,
resulting in a disorienting challenge to your depth
perception.
Stacey Van Buskirk, a.k.a. Girlie8, aligns multiple
translucent screens that emerge into the space at an
angle. Geometric images catch on each plane before
fading out and reemerging on the next, capturing
texture and depth. Van Buskirk, who often performs in
audiovisual collaboration with breakbeat-techno DJ
Anon (Ann Sitko), comes from a musical background and
says, "I sort of keep my musical head in my visual
world."
Matches made in electronic heaven
World-renowned for its electronic music scene, San
Francisco is a natural breeding ground for such
inspired collaborations between visual artists and
electronic musicians ? both VJs and laptop tweakers.
And some VJs take that idea quite literally: filtering
music into software programs that read the pitches and
beats of songs, they cause color-coded images to move
and flash in time with the rhythms. Other artists
switch their sources in relation to the beat or tweak
the colors to match the mood of the music.
"I do certain stuff like cutting on beats and
following rhythms," Pagano says. "I don't think you
can sustain that kind of work over a period of time,
but in driving parts of the music, it can add to the
rhythm to have the image on pulse with it. You
actually feel the music more."
Many VJs feel their work fits particularly well with a
certain genre. Costabile, who usually pairs up with
laptop artists like Wobbly and Kid 606, feels her
style complements both the ambient and the more
aggressive music of the progressive laptop scene. "I
think that a lot of the music I work with is textural
and that the images I make also have a lot of
different textures and layers," she says. Her bright
abstractions tick and streak during more hectic parts
of a song; during ambient, spatial moments the
textures fade in and out of focus, with rounded shapes
gently rolling across one another.
"The glitchy, syncopated aspect of tech-house,
electro, and breakbeats have the same tempo and feel
as I use in my video," Simunovich says. The vintage
electronic sounds and broken-down technological noises
in those genres of music parallel the imagery he likes
? old-school robotics, computers, video games,
disfunctional technology. "Those styles of music are
interested in the technologies that create the music
as well as the music itself," he adds.
And new genres of visual art projections have sprung
up in response to music that calls for particular
imagery and motion. Trance tends to be accompanied by
vibrant oranges and rich greens and purples in
computerized images of fractal geometry and what
Pagano describes as "pseudo-spiritual stuff." Drum 'n'
bass and hip-hop are likely to be matched with
pummeling, shadowy, angular, and urban pictures. House
gets trendy colors, cute flowers, and sexy animations.
Most visual art displays still accompany a DJ, but
some artists prefer to work with live performers, be
they laptop musicians like Wobbly or Kid 606 or a live
hip-hop act like Most Chill Slackmob. Costabile, whose
use of a live camera gives her cinematic performance a
human quality, like that of a live musician, says she
improvises with the music, since she can tangibly
react to it. She touches the source of the colors and
shapes with her hands and can intuitively react to it
by drawing and painting live.
Pagano also revels in the spontaneous nature of live
musicians. "There's something more inspiring about
doing live video with live musicians," he says.
"Unless it's a DJ who's really active ? because then
you get more inspired to get into the improvised
nature of the whole thing."
He sees parallels in the performances of laptop
musicians and video artists ? how they sample and mix.
"There's a lot of loop-based and repetitive stuff, and
there's also a lot of glitchy, weirdo, freaked-out
stuff, and those are all techniques that apply to
mucking around with video in a live setting really
well."
For Simunovich, if the synchronicity is there, it
doesn't matter whether you're collaborating with a DJ
or a live musician. The possibility for creative
outbursts can come through brainstorming before the
set or just completely improvising.
Visions
Live video is now so much a part of performance
culture that it accompanies almost any mainstream pop
show, from Eminem to Shania Twain (granted, it's
usually simple action shots of the live performance ?
live television for the unfortunate kids on the lawn).
In the commercial electronic music world, DJ-producers
Sasha and Digweed or Paul Oakenfold don't leave home
without their visualist. And with acts like Radiohead,
Gorillaz, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor integrating
live visuals into their performances, the art form is
bubbling up in the mainstream ? and even going back to
its rock and roll roots.
As visuals have gotten more common in the commercial
sphere, music equipment manufacturers have picked up
on the demand for more accessible means of producing
them. Software and hardware for the home user are in
the infancy stages, but soon, just as any 16-year-old
with a computer can produce electronic music tracks in
his or her bedroom, we'll all be able to play around
with video mixing. New technologies will project the
medium into unforeseeable forms ? like the new
TransScreens, which are completely transparent, so
that images appear to float ethereally in space, and
the Catalyst, a projector that slides and sways like
stage lights.
Things have changed since Locks first made his pretty
pictures with paint, a glass dish, and an overhead
projector. He probably couldn't have imagined his art
experiments would bring about visual projections at
acid tests, industrial warehouse parties, and the
Superbowl halftime show. And maybe VJs like
Simunovich, Costabile, Pagano, and Davis don't realize
that with each flicker of their moving art they are
making history ? nothing new for San Francisco.