Category Archives: vj

Frames Per Second – Exhibition in Salon Projektionist – Vienna

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frames_per_second
Frames Per Second (2008, 27 MB, 3:26 min)

Video and photo installation by VJs Bopa and Bruno Tait.
The exhibition is based on the idea of using video and slide projectors to
capture a random moment in time from animations on photographic paper,
foregoing the simple system ‘screen shot’ and projecting light onto ILFORD
photo print paper.

pixelbirds – cube pusher

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cube pusher
Cube Pusher (2007, 31MB, 2:49 min)

Deft & very attractive interweaving of video & live performance from pixelbirds.
They make it look effortless; of course it’s anything but.
There’s an interesting form emerging here, with this physical intervention/relation
of live performers to a projection.
This notion has some way to unfold yet, I think, but
this is an excellent staging post.

Rick Silva – A Rough Mix

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A Rough Mix
A Rough Mix (excerpt) (2007, 140MB, 8 min.)

Excerpt from a single channel and a looping installation DVD by Rick Silva.

Oh this is smart & rich & lovely work!
You think perhaps the remix idea has colonised all of our thoughts
& our work to the level of clich�.
(So maybe all that remains is to classicize it – to do it better & better,
which is certainly something Silva, in various guises, has recently done..)
One day, someone describes this work in words to you & you
might, if of a cynical turn of mind, think – ‘Ho-Hum!’
Then you actually look at it & there’s something alchemic going on.
From a fairly base metaphor, Rick Silva conjures a work of elegance,
substance & great beauty – a beauty not only visual but moral.
Look at it! – it’s a paean to the planet but many other things too:
the scratching becomes dance, it’s a dance film!
The music is so carefully cut (but in such an apparently offhand way,
the way one imagines the mythical 19th century gentleman
would cut): it’s a music video!
It’s a travelogue (but its editing would not have made sense
before the net).
Each basic level constantly & fruitfully gives rise to other emergent
meanings which in turn reseed new ways of thinking about the piece
– the mark of a serious & substantial work of art.

PS Interesting to compare this with Cary Peppermint’s recent
Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
– another work that is in a sense engaged around loosely ecological
themes, very much the zeitgeist, (but reasonably so!)
& whose artistic qualities are not confined, limited, by that engagement…

PPS Now I think about it – there’s all the wonderful stuff by Stallbaum & Poole too.
That fits in somewhere too…

PPPS Personally I like this much more than Silva’s recap – for me, in that, there was a sense in which the formal structure based on a kind of repetition over a long period eventually closes
us off ( although one can of course see how that work might have been
a very necessary staging post to this)
– here there’s a fantastic sense of opening-out
Exhilarating!

Curt Cloninger: St Frank and the Wolf

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St Frank and the Wolf
St Frank and the Wolf (2007, 72MB, 6:21 min.)

Curt Cloninger is a clever, original & fearless commentator on new media art,
always worth reading for his eschewal (or at least extremely careful
chewing over) of received new media wisdom.
He also maintains the excellent lab404.com.
This is something a little different; a video record of a live performance piece.
Background from Curt:
‘The projected loops are pre-recorded, but they run in different synch
with each other and are modulated variably depending on the realtime
improvisational performance — so it’s a prescribed performance space
that is qualitatively different each performance. As the theremin
volume gets louder (as my realspace left hand gets higher), the
projected big hands get more opaque and their accompanying volume
gets louder. As the theremin volume gets lower (as my realspace left
hand gets lower), the smaller projected ghost hands get more opaque
and their accompanying volume gets louder.
…Legend has it that a wolf was attacking the town of Gubbio,
so St. Francis was called in to get it to stop. Francis brokered a
deal with the wolf where it agreed to stop attacking the people in
the town if they agreed to feed it and keep their dogs
from bothering it. In a similar spirit, this piece seeks to dialogue
with sound and light and come to some sort of consensus.
The piece is not trying to impose a “taming” order on the media,
nor is it letting the media run wild. It enters into a dialogue with
matter (sound and light in space) in order to modulate and be modulated
by it.’
Reasons to check this piece out despite its large file size:
(1) It has an oddness quotient of over 93%.
(2) The music is neat, bit like the rougher edged output of the
early minimalists plus, also, the generative/aleatoric
thing in music is a hard one to pull off & it’s well done here.
(3) Smart.
(4) It follows no fashion.
(5) It rejects irony – there is real human feeling here, sometimes verging on the ecstatic.