VJ Kicks
Video vandalism and dancefloor evangelism with Dublin's vidjocks.
You know the flowering ball of gaudily-coloured pixels circulating like a pail of slop that Windows Media Player or iTunes calls "the Visualizer"? VJing is like the anti-Visualizer, an attempt to marry intuitive visual stimulation with the aural, physical and sensory assault that you can find for a fiver in any of Dublin's echoing nightclubs, created on the fly by some guy or girl with a visual mixing program, some freaked-out video clips, and a LOT of spare time.
As in the infancy of its sister, DJing (and its baby, electro music), the artform of video-jockeying is still like standing before a blank canvas with a full set of paints and a box of power tools, a ruleless craft which each day acquires new, completely diverse styles. We set about forming a living history of just how far the discipline of VidJocking has come in Dublin to date by talking to some of the city's most renowned video vandals.
Coolhandloop
Where does your VJing story begin?
There was this night going on in the Legal Eagle on the quays that I used to go down to religiously, which a friend ran. He would use slide projectors with stills just for a decor, and I really liked the look of it. So I got a hold of a digital projector and started just showing DVDs that I thought looked good, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then, because I was doing film in college, I start making my own clips and putting them on DVD, which led me on to some programs that you could live mix visuals in, which was a lot more attractive than making a DVD do a 20 minute loop. I really liked the control of being able to put up whatever the fuck you want to a group of impressionable people in a... certain frame of mind.
Where do you get your visual sources?
Some people will rip stuff off the internet, some people will film their own clips, others make their own animations. Generally most of my stuff is film-based, I film the majority of it all myself. The fun is in roping in a couple of mates and making them do what you want. A friend of mine has a big green screen, I usually make use of that.
Is there an Irish VJing scene as such? Do you think VJing will ever be the norm in Irish clubbing?
Even though I'd say there have been VJs here for potentially 15 years, it's still quite a novel thing to find in a club. It's definitely not on a par with London, Paris, or Berlin. For a lot of promoters it's the issue of money. The way they see it, and to a certain extent the way I do too, is that they're the gravy on the dinner. It's not essential to the meal but... who doesn't like gravy? It's happened to me loads of times - on the day of a gig you get a phone call from the promoter saying "Sorry guy, the ticket sales were shit, we can't pay you to come in." It's getting better in that venues are starting to have projecters built into them now, but then nightlife is still so comparatively small it inevitably takes longer for something like this to become a fixture. There's about a handful of actually-good VJs in the city.
Where do you take your inspiration from?
It's the cop-out answer, but I really take it from everywhere. Because a lot of the stuff I shoot is mainly narrative, and made up of very silly, quirky humour (sometimes it's just the stupidest thing I can think of, like "what about a man with a beard eating an ice-cream?") it just needs to be any idea done well. You can't expect the clubbers to look at your visuals for a sustained period, so there's a challenge to create something that's short and effective, that'll give you a quick laugh or something to remember you by. There are certain acts like DJ Yoda where the entire point is this audio-visual experience, but the rest of us are second fiddle. If the music is crap, nobody's going to come out of the club saying "What an awful night... but Jesus, the visuals were great!".
Shonagh Hurley
Where does your VJing story begin?
I've been mixing live for about a year, doing motion graphics for about two, and video editing for three. I'm not really sure how I arrived there. I've always been interested in live visuals and motion graphics, and didn't ever understand this sort of moving wallpaper that any club with visuals would put up. I like something with more narrative and depth, something that can invoke some sort of emotion.
Is it easy to communicate a message through VJing?
That's the main challenge of it, trying to create something where people in the club point up at what you're doing and shout to their friends "look what's on the screen!" It's not a success if people go away from the night and can't remember a single clip you did.
Is there more of a novelty factor to VJing in Dublin than, say, Berlin?
You would think so, but people simply don't have the money for it in most places in Berlin, or anywhere at all, really. Even if the creative scene is really strong, its difficult for places to afford it. There's a very small group here, and maybe only a couple of thousand in the UK. You could still ask somebody who clubs regularly "What's a VJ?" and they won't have a clue. "You mean a DJ?"
Do you think it's a medium that is going anywhere? It's been around, technically, since the 50s, but obviously the internet facilitates it a lot more now.
I think it's going to soar. You can buy a Mac and the software for relatively cheap, and do something in an afternoon whereas before computers wouldn't even have the processing power for it. Still, 90% of your night is about the music, and that would need to change. I think that once technology gets over a little hump, after another step where the audience can interact with the visuals, using different sensors maybe, it will become a bigger part of the experience.
Where do you get your visual sources?
Well I use... vintage porn! That's my favourite stuff to use. But mainly I make stop-motion stuff, I don't even have a video-camera. Most of my stuff is motion graphics or animation I make through frame-by-frames layers in Photoshop.
How open are promoters to letting you do what you want to do?
I work with my boyfriend (Mano Le Tough) quite a lot, and know his music well so that I'll do my own thing and he might suggest some little changes. But with everything else you just figure out the mood and the vibe, and you get free reign, pretty much.
Where do you take your inspiration from?
There's a London-based DJ, Bubba, who'll do stop-motion stuff and film stuff herself. She's quite girly, I like her a lot.
Gareth Averill
Where does your VJing story begin?
Well, I can tell you how I started VJing and why I started VJing. I was doing film in college, concentrating on directing music videos and drumming in bands. What happened was a natural progression, I suppose. I shot a few short films in college, experimental pieces centred around visuals rather than dialogue. My brother (Jon, of Shock! fame) saw them, and pointed out how they could be used as live visuals. So I went about cutting them up for a live scenario, and we started them off at smaller shows to good feedback. The 'why' I got into it, I figured out, is that I love working while listening to music. My main jobs were editing and mixing sound, both jobs you don't have control over what you're listening to. So the visuals stuff was this perfect escape, it's totally relaxed, and there are no rules. As a tech-geek you get to play with all these filters that don't work in any other environment. I saw acts like Modeselektor and Ellen Allien using visuals, making everything come together to make something as visually arresting as aurally, and couldn't figure out why more people weren't combining the two.
How far will VJing go? Do you think that, as with DJing, the wider availability of free software and cheaper hardware means more people will move into it?
Yeah, of course. With free software and the ability to pull whatever you want from YouTube almost anybody can do it. There's much less of a spectacle with DJing, if you put something behind him and cut it to the beats, it finishes off the whole show when done right.
Is there an Irish VJing scene as such?
Over here it's slowly, surely getting there. You have some clued-in promoters and clubs like the Bernard Shaw and Twisted Pepper run by people who see the potential in this. This year especially I've seen a big rise in it, but whether people see it as more than just a novelty, I don't know. I think if you mention VJing or club visuals to most people they think of the club's logo spinning on the wall or... star wipes. I think if a sense of consistency comes through it'll start to grow. At the minute though, you can count the amount of people doing it right on one hand.
Where do you get your visual sources?
I shoot a lot of stuff to film, which makes it automatically look shit hot. The ideal would be to work with a promoter and have the backing to just go out and film what you want. But it's great working with people like Nightflight and Shock, where you get a simple identity to work with, and you can just pull stuff from the internet and fit it in with their logo. There's so much completely insane stuff out there already, or even the most mundane stuff that can look great. I gravitate towards a lot of 60s and 70s stuff, you'd swear everybody with a camera then was smoking crack. The infomercials and commercials of that time are so surreal. It's like they knew someone, somewhere in thirty years time was going to be putting it behind a DJ in a room.
