The '60s light show has been radically updated by a new generation of VJs.
Have you ever found yourself in a nightclub, eyes agape at a video projection screen, watching a flood of wild figures, icons, symbols, and patterns streaming by, and wondering, just who is generating this stuff? Well, behind these psychedelic patterns and collected shards of mass media culture is an idealistic new breed of digitally brazened artist - the club VJ.
If club DJs are disc jockeys - riding the range of record stores culling the latest, verviest bits of vinyl for their shows - then club VJs are surely video jacks - plugging into broadcast channels, snatching morsels from the mass-media goulash, mixing their own tasty visual brews. And in vivid contrast to their better known namesakes, those benign, chipper hosts on MTV, these VJs want to incite their audiences.
Unlike the broadcast VJ, pushing product (and conformity) by serving up highly polished group identities to which the individual consumer will presumably gravitate, the club VJ is trying to work his or her audience into a frenzied state - a place where the crowd loses itself in the intoxicating mix of psychotropic video art and provocative iconography.
It should be no surprise that the San Francisco Bay Area beckons many of the more provocative VJs. Aside from the rich legacy of psychedelic visuals from the hippie days, there is a plethora of programming talent, and, perhaps most important, San Francisco's standing as the last US bastion of the Rave or House movement - the trend that infused the twentysomething generation in the UK with a sense of communal presence and purpose.
An Inciting Artform
"We work on the knowledge that people are moved by symbols on an unconscious level," says Dan Mapes, the founder of the Digital Media RealityLab in San Francisco. "What we are doing is really just a part of the shamanistic tradition of taking the tribe on a trip to another world, so that when they return they bring a different sense of relativity and perspective on their lives."
If Mapes sounds like a holdover from '60s oil-on-overhead-projector shows, he is. In fact he may be one of the grand masters among VJs, having spent a good portion of the '70s and '80s experimenting with pyscho-acoustics and pyscho-visuals as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. With the arrival of powerful desktop video tools in the last few years, Mapes has been able to create works that he believes have a truly profound effect on audiences. He has gathered a talented troupe of graphic artists, Video Toaster-heads, and other digital craftsfolk to create works that offer, in Mapes's use of Gestalt psychology terms, "both figure and ground simultaneously" to move an audience.
Mapes explains that, unlike conventional movies and TV shows, the lab's live shows strive to set off a figurative foreground element such as a 3-D model or video image, in a torrent of often bedazzling ground elements, such as layers of pyschedelic graphics. The aim is to present what Mapes terms "a more naturalistic and evocative visual mindscape" that will encourage those in the crowd to relax their inhibitions and fly away from the flock. The lab has compiled databanks of original graphics, ancient symbols, video footage, 3-D models, and sampled elements that it adds to the mix at its live performances to set a certain pace or stir up a certain group mood.
Take a Trip With Me
This goal - taking club revelers on a group trip to a place they could never find at home sitting in front of the box - is clearly the club VJ's charge. Dave Richardson, who along with fellow Australian exile Andy Frith forms the VJ team Hyperdelicious, sees his work as a much needed counterbalance to "passive, autistic mainstream entertainment."
Hyperdelicious's visuals can be challenging - they frequently present familiar TV imagery in ironic juxtapostions that undercut the flash-fire iconograghy and video phraseology that increasingly defines the MTV generation. The goal "is to bombard the gathering with stimuli, to make it much harder for people to bring their own conditioning, their own labeling and preconceptions to bear on that crowd," says Richardson. The often searing tone of Hyperdelicious's performances can probably be ascribed to the years the team spent in Japan, where as foreigners, Richardson says, they were able to see that country's advertising "exactly for what it is: blatant manipulation."
It is, of course, all too easy to belittle this pronounced goal of the VJs of the club scene - to provide visual potions that mystically bring different groups together and break down barriers. Most people view the gatherings as little more than retro-psychedelic drug and dance fests. While that may indeed be the case, for the VJ this very perception poses the greatest challenge.
"If we can create that high for people, the experience of being on hallucinogens without taking any drugs, then we have done a good show," says Alan Aronoff, who along with Tony Grant constitutes Synergy, a VJ team with a light, flowing style. Synergy creates floating, cycling graphics layered with images like entranced tribal drummers and graceful dancers pulled from Hollywood musicals. The result is a truly soothing experience. "We are trying to create a certain synergy," says Grant, "synergy between the music and the video, synergy between the crowd and the VJ, and synergy between art and technology."
Grant looks forward to the day when he can take this concept of synergy to the next level by using infrared devices or some similiar technology to enable the crowd to trigger the visuals, raising the tempo of transitions or patterns or other aspects of the visual experience.
While the day of audience-driven visuals may still be a few years away, the spread of these intoxicating VJ brews is imminent. The Digital Media RealityLab provided visuals for the fall '93 tours of Peter Gabriel and Billy Idol. And Mapes says that his group and Brett Leonard, the director of Lawnmower Man, are launching a cable TV channel specifically for these new, pyschotropic media. Look for it this spring.
Digital Media RealityLab: +1 (415) 641 7092, +1 (408) 476 8464. Hyperdelicious: +1 (415) 956 9776. Synergy: +1 (415) 280 8303.
