Zarah working in residence at the wonderful Experimental Television Center here in New York State. Deserving of love and respect? Heck, yes. And so are you. The person hiring you may just need some hand-holding about how to give it to you.
Zarah Cabañas akaLady Firefly has a radical concept: what if you treated visualists properly as professionals? But she doesn’t make any assumptions that people working with visualists will know what to do. In a new manifesto posted to “Respect Your VJ,” she spells it out so there’s no mistake — including practical advice for making it happen.
You probably won’t learn anything by reading it. But the person hiring you (unfortunately) probably could. In short, the idea is:
Give credit.
Love them - including letting them play onstage.
Visualists are artists, not tech crew. (You should love your tech crew, too, but you wouldn’t highlight them onstage - unlike the visual artist.)
Pay them, and promptly.
Go over tech specs.
In fact, the whole idea is to communicate with the visualist, and give them the kind of input that will allow them to do more for you.
The “respect your VJ” suggestions are all simple stuff, but boy, is it often missed. I love the idea of it being on one website. Have a look; I’m curious if anyone has items they’d add.
[ How would you describe you ideal gig? ]
Short and sweet. One thing that I’ve learned over the years, nothing can kill your artistic vibe more then 8 hours of continuous retinal mixing overload. That being said I enjoy the unexpected.
One of my favorite mixing experiences ever, took place in a tiny club in Shibuya Tokyo during a Lightrhythm Visuals tour. I had no idea what type of music I would be mixing too, was totally unprepared and had just managed to get unlost from the Tokyo jungle. The band turned out to be the most fierce live jazz group on the planet. I had never felt so thrilled and challenged as a live visualist.
[ Where do you think video performance is heading? ]
Hopefully to higher levels of quality and meaning. Obviously technology will be as important as ever in defining the landscape of live visuals. The high end tools that are available today such as VDMX, Processing and Resolume 3 will hopefully give artists the freedom to focus more on the art form rather then the technical hurdles that have plagued the movement for such a long time.
In January I had a chance to catch up with Deborah Johnson, who was touring Australia at the time with Sufjan Stevens. The morning after their show in Brisbane, Australia we recorded an hour-long discussion of the show, and seeming to cover the whole gamut of visual creativity and performance. I’ve finally managed to transcribe this epic from audio to text.
Deborah: I would really like to see our show from the audience’ perspective.
Jaymis: I would have loved to have shot some video. There are some really beautiful moments. Did you notice that there was quite a bit of the crowd cheering visuals?
Jaymis: No?
Jaymis: I noticed that there was a couple times when you did something, nothing else was happening, and people around me were “yeaah!”, and not just the people I’ve conditioned to do that, either.
Deborah: ~laughs~
Jaymis: You’ve obviously got a good aesthetic happening. I’ve seen on your website as well you have that kind of drawn aesthetic. Do you do the illustration yourself?
Deborah: On the website?
Jaymis: In the set, you have images that come up: Stars, growing vine objects…
Deborah: Those are all based on drawings, they’re all drawing programs that are written in Director. I work with a programmer, and we’ll be like “this is what I want to have happen”, and he writes an algorithm to make that happen.
Jaymis: Peter would be very excited that someone’s still using Director… So that’s then rendered out to video clips?
Deborah: I mean, the dream is to be able to make them instruments that I can play live, but…
Jaymis: Director’s getting a bit old for that kind of thing. You might have to go with Processing or Quartz Composer or one of those fun things.
Deborah: I really would like to learn Processing. Recently I feel like I’ve become more of a curator, art director.
Jaymis: As video gets bigger that’s what you have to become; you can’t do it all anymore.
Deborah: For this, I knew what I wanted to happen, but I knew that I would need some help. So I started working with a programmer named Siebren Versteeg, who’s an awesome artist in New York. It was great because in Sufjan’s music there’s just so many layers of stuff that happens. My skills were limited to be able to create something that’s just totally generative and so massive, there’s no way that I could author that stuff. So how do you just get a source concept and send it out over an animation.
One thing that I worry about is that it becomes too… Say with Processing or that kind of work, people associate it with screensavers?
Jaymis: Very true. Well I guess that growing vines is one of those things which is quite ubiquitous with that sort of thing. Obviously you’ve got a particularly cool little spin on it and it works really well in the context of what’s happening on stage, but “something growing” is a very standard…
I was first introduced to Cornelius in Film School, where the buddy I often shared a dark editing room would play ‘Count Five or Six’ while I attempted to count and mark 16mm frames on the tiny strips running through our moviolas. This January, I jumped on the chance to see him at the awesome Walt Disney Concert Hall with Plaid.
Let’s start off with Plaid. I was very excited to see them, after catching their AV Set with Bob Jaroc at the Natural History Museum last year. The visuals, unfortunately, didn’t do much for me. There were a few sweet moments, but mostly I felt trapped in a semi-monotonous 3d visualizer. As we broke for intermission, I talked with a few other VJs and they agreed. I was skeptical about Cornelius, and figured I’d just have to settle for a rockin’ audio set and not expect much from the visuals.
I’m glad I was wrong.
Cornelius’ set started off with slow-mo footage of a giant bubble floating in a park. I couldn’t tell if it was CG or footage, and it didn’t matter. With the beautiful swells of the music and the rainbow-riffing undulating soap mass onscreen, I was lifted out of my funk and ready for an awesome show.
Each song had its own specific video - and each one looked and felt very different from the last, which does wonders to avoid visual burnout. Ironically, the first visuals set where I was amazed by the variety of visual atmospheres was that first Plaid/Bob Jaroc show.
His LED light rig was simple and spectacular. He had several lighting stands with rows of LEDs, and custom patterns that matched or contrasted the video for each song. There were also strobes mounted on top of each pole which were used sparingly and to great effect to punch up the impact of the hardest-rocking songs. You can see them in the following video:
Please note that this footage, taken in video mode with a still camera from the very last row in the hall, does not nearly do justice to the quality and variety of video. That said, it’ll give you a taste of the night, which is better than nothing.
One question that remains after the show - how did they keep it all synced up? I suppose Cornelius could be playing to a click-track, but it all felt very freeform, so I’m inclined to discount that idea. My only guess at this point is a DVJ or something similar that played back the pre-composed videos, with a VJ speeding up or slowing down the playback to stay in sync - like a DJ would do to keep two records from trainwrecking.
If you have any favorite moments from the show, or ideas on how they put together the video, leave your mark in the comments.
For the live performance, it’s an important part as there’s not only the sound in live shows but the visual aspect. By creating visuals I think it helps to understand more about the music as my songs are in Japanese.
If you really want live visualism and VJing to make an impact, step one is giving your display mechanism a major upgrade. Great content and artistry matters, but without a way of communicating to them the audience — well, you musicians know what it’s like when the PA is crap and you can’t be heard.
Roger Bolton (known to many here as the creator of Quartz Composer-based Quartonian) passes along some of the brilliant work he’s been doing with Pixeladdicts, the UK-based VJ collective, events outfit, motion graphics group, and, well, generally visualist crew. This work with Younger Brother has to be about the most drool-worthy visual rig I’ve seen with live music. The Pixeladdicts site is under construction (such is the problem with having lots of gigs), but check out their YouTube page for more:
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