DISCO TECH
Go into a Miami nightclub these days and you may see what local VJ Miguel Delgado calls "waking dreams." Delgado, onetime indie filmmaker and MTV-video director and now one of South Beach's top VJs, uses a Silicon Graphics O2 digital composition platform and Discreet software to assemble and project surreal images at several area clubs. Feeding snippets of film and stills into the O2, Delgado creates layers of background designs, morphing the images, setting them aflame, sometimes laying completed video tracks over images projected by in-house cameras. The effect is hypnotic. "It's a kind of mainframe that everyone can plug into," says Delgado. "Where the technology is going next is virtual reality."
Miami's night spots increasingly rely on tech to attract and retain fickle clubgoers. One club, Level, features more than 80 multicolored digital strobes that pan and tilt in sync with the bass line, while lasers trace 3-D figures midair above bobbing heads.
Club owners have also come to depend on the Web to promote special events, book reservations, and connect distant clubbers via live feeds. "When people networked back in the '70s at Studio 54, it was just exchanging business cards. This is really networking," proclaims longtime club kingpin Tommy Pooch (aka Thomas Puccio), whose latest South Beach venture, the Nikki Beach Club, has become a magnet for the in crowd. As tech takes center stage, a hot DJ may now take home more money in a night than the owner does. Technology also creates some other interesting business problems.
"You have people coming in who aren't with their wives or husbands, and they're asking, 'Is this place wired?'" Pooch reports. "They want to make sure they aren't being watched on a computer at home." Another concern, Pooch says, is cyberthieves. "I see more and more people walking in here with Palmcorders. For all I know, they're recording my club, putting it on the Internet, and charging for it."
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