Visual Berlin have just announced their “µ:avit”, a one-day vj meet amongst their ongoing shenanigans at the DMY design fair. Expect a community-led, do-it-yourself feel and a day full of faces-to-names and interesting works. I’ll be there running a full-day Quartz Composer workshop, and the action is sure to run till late via club gigs and suchlike.
There is a press release here, and the website is fresh online at http://dmy.avit.info. So fresh in fact, that the organisers haven’t even added themselves as participants yet! So, I’d say if you want to spend a fun and rewarding day in Berlin, book the 24th and go sign up on the website.
Where better than the self-proclaimed most isolated city on Earth to talk about the state — and future — of VJing? The Byte Me Festival in Perth, Australia brought a rare convergence of digitalists and visualists in December. We cornered a variety of individuals at the open-jam Plug ‘n Play, from lay persons to internationally-touring artists, to chat about their work and the live visual scene in general.
My personal favorite interview of the night was Solu, the Finnish-born, Barcelona-based audiovisual artist. Solu’s meditative A/V set, with softly-echoing deconstructed wartime imagery, was one of the highlights of the evening. She stopped to talk to us about:
“In this scene, women are missing … even though in workshops, there are 50/50 women and men. I think we need more women here, definitely, for many reasons.”
what to call what she’s doing (”live visualist”? “video processor”?)
how she got into visualism
how women respond to her work (the “dream world” description I thought was apt)
where all the women have gone
why VJs should be paid fairly, and their art respected more — not just as a means of selling bottles of booze
why 2008 will be the best year ever.
Sounds like a platform for global VJ President. Got my vote.
Incidentally, since someone asked in comments on another story, her three tools of choice were, in order, Max/MSP/Jitter, Isadora, Modul8. Max/Jitter was the software of the evening, for sound and visuals.
In case you missed it the first time, our informally-edited footage of Plug ‘n Play is mostly Solu for the second half. Seeing her live is best, though, so keep your eyes peeled, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in Barcelona.
Being in Perth, Australia with some of our favorite VJs/visualists was a real inspiration. We’re still processing some of that inspiration — and, literally, all the footage and words we captured while there. One highlight was undoubtedly the Byte Me Festival’s Plug and Play night Thursday. Plug and Play is a regular event in what is supposedly the world’s most isolated city, an open jam for visuals. It reminded me of the open video mixers we’ve had in New York at Share and formerly at Eyewash, but it benefits from being dedicated, as the name suggests, to a full evening of visuals. (Maybe it’s time to follow up our Handmade Music events with Handmade Motion.)
This particular evening, though, was really a global event:
It represents people from all around the Australian continent, plus the United States and Europe. Here are some glimpses of the evening, featuring custom tools in Pd/GEM and Quartz Composer, but focusing on the extended ambient audio + visual set by Solu. (Solu had not only meditative visuals to watch but, along with the other VJs, some reflections on visualism in general; more on that soon.)
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