VJing (Spoken Article).ogg

VJing (pronounced: ''VEE-JAY-ing'') is a broad designation for realtime visual performance. Characteristics of VJing are the creation or manipulation of imagery in realtime through technological mediation and for an audience, in synchronization to music. VJing often takes place at events such as concerts, nightclubs, music festivals and sometimes in combination with other performative arts. This results in a live multimedia performance that can include music, actors and dancers. The term VJing became popular in its association with MTV's Video Jockey but its origins date back to the New York club scene of the 1970s. In both situations VJing is the manipulation or selection of visuals, the same way DJing is a selection and manipulation of audio.

One of the key elements in the practice of VJing is the realtime mix of content from a "library of media", on storage media such as VHS tapes or DVDs, video and still image files on computer hard drives, live camera input, or from computer generated visuals. In addition to the selection of media, VJing mostly implies realtime processing of the visual material. The term is also used to describe the performative use of generative software, although the word "becomes dubious ... since no video is being mixed".

History

Antecedents

Historically, VJing gets its references from art forms that deal with the synesthetic experience of vision and sound. These historical references are shared with other live audiovisual art forms, such as Live Cinema, to include the camera obscura, the panorama and diorama, the magic lantern, color organ, and liquid light shows.

The color organ is a mechanism to make colors correspond to sound through mechanical and electromechanic means. Bainbridge Bishop, who contributed to the development of the color organ, was "dominated with the idea of painting music". In a book from 1893 that documents his work, Bishop states: "I procured an organ, and experimented by building an attachment to the keys, which would play with different colored lights to correspond with the music of the instrument."

Between 1919 and 1927, Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, a piano soloist, created a new technological art form called ''Nourathar'', which means "essence of light" in Arabic. Her light music consisted of environmental color fields that produced a scale of light intensities and color. "In place of a keyboard, the Sarabet had a console with graduated sliders and other controls, more like a modern mixing board. Lights could be adjusted directly via the sliders, through the use of a pedal, and with toggle switches that worked like individual keys."

In clubs and private events in the 1960s "people used liquid-slides, disco balls and light projections on smoke to give the audience new sensations. Some of these experiments were linked to the music, but most of the time they functioned as decorations." These came to be known as ''liquid light shows''.
From 1965 to 1966 in San Francisco, the visual shows by artist collectives such as The Joshua Light Show and the Brotherhood of Light accompanied The Grateful Dead concerts, which were inspired by the Beat generation—in particular the Merry Pranksters—and fueled by the "expansion of consciousness" from the Acid Tests.

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, between 1966 and 1967, organized by Andy Warhol contributed to the fusion of music and visuals in a party context. "The Exploding Party project examined the history of the party as an experimental artistic format, focusing in particular on music visualization - also in live contexts"

1970s

Important events

During the late 1970s video and music performance became more tightly integrated. At concerts, a few bands started to have regular film/video along with their music. Experimental film maker Tony Potts was considered an unofficial member of The Monochrome Set for his work on lighting design and film making for projections for live shows. Test Department initially worked with "Bert" Turnball as their resident visual artist, creating slideshows and film for live performances. The organization, Ministry of Power included collaborations with performance groups, traditional choirs and various political activists.
Industrial bands would perform in art contexts, as well as in concert halls, and often with video projections. Groups like Cabaret Voltaire started to use low cost video editing equipment to create their own time-based collages for their sound works. In their words, "before he use of video you had to do collages on paper, but now you present them in rhythm—living time—in video." The film collages made by and for groups such as the Test Dept, Throbbing Gristle and San Francisco's Tuxedomoon became part of their live shows.

An example of mixing film with live performance is that of Public Image Ltd. at the Ritz Riot in 1981. This club, located on the East 9th St in New York, had a state of the art video projection system. It was used to show a combination of prerecorded and live video on the club's screen. PiL played behind this screen with lights rear projecting their shadows on to the screen. Expecting a more traditional rock show, the audience reacted by pelting the projection screen with beer bottles and eventually pulling down the screen.

Technological developments

An artist retreat in Owego New York called Experimental Television Center, founded in 1971, made contributions to the development of many artists by gathering the experimental hardware created by video art pioneers: Nam June Paik, Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, and made the equipment available to artists in an inviting setting for free experimentation. Many of the outcomes debuted at the nightclub Hurrah which quickly became a new alternative for video artists who could not get their avant garde productions aired on regular broadcast outlets. Similarly, music video development was happening in other major cities around the world, providing an alternative to mainstream television.

A notable image processor is the Sandin Image Processor

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