Author: Yutong Lin

How can VJ be more than “cool?”

I have had this question for a long time. Before I was first introduced to the concept of VJ, I thought it was really “cool.” The concept of “cool,” on the other hand, what does it exactly mean? What features or characteristics are associated with the concept of “cool” in VJ?

Is it technology? Is it the liveness? Is it the sensory experience with visual? Is it in the nature of the venue that a lot of VJ performances take place – the night clubs and music festivals? I think the problem with the generalization of VJ which boils down to “cool,” and no more than “cool” is the presentation of VJ lacks a requirement for more critical and intellectual conversation around it, except with drug and alcohol, it stimulates hormone and epinephrine. And the experience, the very experience of sensory stimulation is “cool,” since it must be experienced at that moment. And the experience was not experienced before. Being “cool” means being the alien for the indescribable, beyond or under utterance. 

The social aspect of “cool” in VJ is associated with another form of social capital – uniqueness, fashion, and popularity. VJ can be considered a way of publicity that communicates between the participants and the practitioners. 

 Dug down from the surface of how cool VJ is, Fischer thought about what does VJ mean historically and socially. And the artistic potential of VJ as a medium of expression. 

Historically, she also mentioned the musical nature of VJ in relation to DJ, “The performative character of a VJ performance is closely connected to the structural and formal influences of the music: composition, rhythm, the desire to create immersive 12 [ spaces, and the use of samples, 13 [ loops, 14 [ or patterns, 15 [ all of which can be compared to the development of electronic music and DJing.”

She also analyzes in detail the “liveness” of VJ by citing the German theater scientist Erika Fischer-Lichte, who defines “‘liveness’ as “the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators,”

She considers the improvisation of VJ is one of the essences of VJ as performance, “Participation, reciprocity, and interaction are some of its characteristics, as well as enduring and appearing in the very moment.”

Content-wise, I think Fischer also mentions VJ has the potential for experimental cinema. Through visual enhancement, repetition, transformation, and curation of even very simple content, the outcome of VJ can be sacralized in the ritualistic practice of live performance. There are some new there at the moment, sublimed from the mundanity of simple things. 

I think contextualization a VJ piece through selections of video footage, consideration of generated visuals, making guidelines of the performance but not step-by-step, choosing/making appropriate music, rules are important for the audience and greater art/creative community to think about VJ more than “cool.” Eventually, as VJ/Visualists, we should have a statement through the work, more than dizzy visual effects that make people sick.

Title

Eyeball

Project Abstract

The project is an audio-visual performance that interprets Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia with digital media production.  

Project Description

The title Eyeball implies the physiology that we rely on to sense the world, which connects the reality with our mind. As an experiment, the concept of the project is about the abstraction of liquid, shape, and light in relation to musical composition. We thought a lot about the translation between audio and visual – the ambiance, emotion, tensity that communicates in between in a synaesthesia sense.

  Perspective and Context

From my perspective, the communication between the visual and audio as well as the concept of synaesthesia go beyond a form of synchronization of the obvious notifications, like matching a color with a key, or changing the frame rate according to drum beats…etc, which are the easiest way to interpret visual music. However, I think the term visual music integrates the visual and auditory senses and makes a new experience that is incomplete without either.

Inspired a lot by Joshua Light Show and their projects/practices, we think that simple materials can create sophisticated visual stimuli as long as the intention of the artists is well articulated. 

It does not always have to be expensive or “high-tech.” Therefore, we try to express our ideas and creativity within a range of mundane and accessible materials –  water, plastic, and other found and recyclable materials.   

Development & Technical Implementation

Link to the gist for Vizzie patch.

Link to the gist for Beap patch.

Our first idea was actually using a scientific magnifier to examine some microorganisms in a natural water source like the late or ocean. Initially, it was an environmental-related project. However, it didn’t work out, the scientific magnifier we ordered on Taobao didn’t function and we didn’t want to stick with the idea of environmentalism any more. When we were kind of stuck, Phyllis and Hoiyan discovered the reflection of the colored water can be quite intriguing visuals, and we together decided to work around that. 

Later, we each find our own role in the production process – me as the main visual mixer, Phyllis as the main performer, and Hoiyan as the main musician. We didn’t just complete our job and went away, but we always discussed and revised together when it was possible. I have less working knowledge in music than Hoiyan and Phyllis, so my role in musical composition is to come up with more constructive advice and feedback while thinking about the visual representation of them.  

We did our choreography for the visual and music at the same time. Phyllis and I ran through every single visual effect in Max and discussed whether and when should we use them or not. 

Here is the first visual we are excited about in terms of the color scheme:

Testing the color effect: 

The parameters mattered! I also actively screenshotted the parameters’ detail in case of a crushed max patch (which happened multiple times)

And after listening to the music I figured that the structure of visuals should also be a gradual building-up process. So I came up with the idea to start from the gentle and more simple ones and leads the audience to the climax of the most intriguing and abstract forms:

I really love the midi controller which gave me enormous freedom of my hands to live-perform the video. I made a little manual at the beginning to remind myself of the correspondent visual trigger with the buttons/knobs/sliders. But in the end, I just don’t need them anymore because I already remembered them too well.    

The only thing I have to complain about the image quality of the webcam, it is really not that good. 

Performance

I really enjoyed the performance in the auditorium. The high-quality speakers and projectors really elevate the experience. Since we have rehearsed multiple times before the performance, I think the process went relatively smooth. Overall, the teamwork worked out pretty well. However, in the beginning, there are some problems to display our visual on the projector but use another sound input at the same time, but fortunately, the system finally worked with assistance from IT. It reminds me that to familiarize ourselves with the performance venue is necessary in case some fatal technical difficulties occur and have plan B for that. What if the sound just didn’t work? Are there external speakers? These are all things we need to think about beforehand.

Additionally, the screen display should be always set to the non-sleep mode. In our performance, the screen went black for one second since nobody touched it, which caused a little glitch.        

Conclusion

I think it is more than a midterm project but also a teamwork experience. Hoiyan and Phyllis are very patient and detail-oriented who gave me considerable feedback and I learned so much from them. The project itself made me think more about what sets up the tone for music and visual experience, how to make cinematic effects/potential storytelling out of an abstract audio-visual experience, and what’s the potential for audio-visual performance outside the club scene? In conclusion, I think it made me become more critical of my own perspective. 

Julia H Schroder’s article “Graphic Notation” provides a concise history of musical graphic notation and its different approaches/categorization while guiding us in understanding its practical and aesthetic value. While it was a common practice for artists, especially abstract painters (Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian) in the first decades of the twentieth century to absorb inspiration from music, music graphics after 1950 is even more comparable to a traditional staff notation because its instructional nature – to guide a specific musical performance, is well integrated into its creation. The abstraction and freedom featured in a music graphics provide a new vision for musical performance which is highly expressive and individual, something that is limited by the rigid standard from traditional musical notation. During the preparation for our project 2 live performance, we tried practicing this novel approach to draw an overall instruction.

This is our graphic score to illustrate the acting process during the performance, reflecting the three roles of us – performance (Phyllis), visual effects (Yutong), and sound&music (Hoiyan). We three each can read the graphic score in terms of visual cues for action. Furthermore, the graphic score also indicates the duration and frequency of action which corresponds to the musical composition.   

We composed five phases of the audio-visual performance, which are the introduction (A), transition (B), enhancing (C), climax (D), ending (E). The three components each have been choreographed to form the overall audio-visual experience and the emotional state. 

Introduction: The goal of the intro phase is to set the tone of the visual and acoustic tone and slowly lead the audience to the experience, which can be described as gentle, ambient, and spatial.

Transition: During the transition phase, visual effects will be added to create more complexity and repetition to reflect the musical composition. The emotion of this phase can be described as ethereal.

 Enhancing: The enhancing phase emphasizes the mysteriousness of the sound in terms of strong visuals. The color scheme and aesthetics are mean to stimulate a sensory response. 

Climax: The Climax is the phase where the performance, sound, and visuals are at their strongest. 

Ending: The ending echos with the introduction and slowly dies down. 

Title

Digital Nostalgia Vol.1: Glitch

Link to the video (No sound):

Link to the audio:

Screenshots: 

Project Description

It is an audio-visual performance about my personal understanding of generative music and its visual representation in the form of glitch. My intention is to blend the aesthetics of futurism and nostalgia. 

Perspective and Context

I don’t want to superimpose my interpretation of the music piece and map that to the visual, but instead, I want to create a space where the visual elements and the music are responding to one another and open to personal interpretation. Therefore, I narrowed down the main color scheme to the prime colors which creates interesting combinations. 

And I divided the visual into five main parameters that can be manipulated: 1) color scheme, 2) color transition of a single scene (gradient or rigid), 3) size distribution of the grid system, 4) the ratio between the horizontal distribution and the vertical distribution of the grid, and 5) the transition between each scene. 

Each parameter is controlled by a set of audio output (one oscillator or midi) split by the audio splitter. 

(But I changed this after the presentation and made the visual controlled more by the signal generated from the final audio output as a whole, to make the interaction between audio and visual more coherent and relevant.)

In this way, the complexity of the visual speaks about the generative nature of the layers of music. The visual effects and the aesthetics of glitch also resonate with the techno touch of the music. It blends the futurism and nostalgic feelings both in acoustic and visual experience. I can see that in the setting of an electronic music clubbing scene or techno music festival, where it can be better experienced when facilitated by epinephrine.      

 Development & Technical Implementation

Link to the patcher:

https://gist.github.com/Amber-yutong-lin/cec72c595fbc37bafa48dede8f11a085

Screenshots of the patcher (organized):

Screenshots of the audio production: 

I used oscillators to generate the main rhythm and midi for the drum sequence, and I also sampled from a synthesized electronic guitar and human voice to be the undertone of the music. The music itself gave a feeling of “emotionally-neutral,” “timelessness,” and “digital,” which made me think about what is the visual aesthetics of digital can respond to the intuitions I have for the music I created. 

Screenshots of the visual production:

After a million times of experimentations, a lot of them are too complex, random and chaotic in terms of color scheme, layout or transitions. However, finally, I settled down with the prime color combination of RGB together with black and white (with other colors appear at intervals for a very small portion on the screen) – they are not very busy but busy enough. 

And I added other effects to manipulate the size, proportion, and transitions. Instead of using very rigid transitions, I used more gradient colors and xfader accompanied by pixelation and grid to fuse the fine line between digital and analog, and futurism and nostalgia.  Together, they created a glitchy effect that I didn’t expect in the first place but ended up liking it a lot.

 

Presentation

During the presentation, I received a lot of very constructive feedback and I also observed a lot of amazing handling of the AV interactions from my classmates:

1. Make the relevance between audio and visual more visible and on point;
2. When the transitions between scenes are too fast, change the speed of the transitions to make it easier on the eyes;
3. Create more space to breathe – find a balance between visual abundance and the lack of it, as well as busy audio and silence.

Screenshots: 

Therefore, I updated my patcher and did a minor edition on the visuals. I added the Xfader that turns the canvas to black in order to achieve 2) and 3). And made the visual controlled more by the over-all audio signal instead of each oscillator or midi to achieve 1).     

Conclusion

In conclusion, I familiarize myself with the workflow and functionalities of Vizzie and beap. 

I have some thoughts and critique of my project when reflecting on my process:  

1. I only used the audio to manipulate the visuals since I began with the audio production and moved to visuals. I would like to experiment with using the visuals to generate the music. And a combination of both as well;
2. The unexpected outcome comes from experimentations. When the effects are generated, the design of a mechanism to control them is more thoughtful than the effects themselves;      
3. Make different volumes of the Digital Nostalgia series for the next step using some iconic visual elements from the Millennium period besides the glitch. Like a lot of the video gaming visuals and aesthetics, or music videos, etc, etc.        

I think the conception and mechanical sophistication of Lumia really bring to life the philosophy of Thomas Wilfred. During the time, when “the most forward-thinking painters still used such traditional materials as oil, watercolor, and tempera, Wilfred was devising a mechanical technique akin to painting with the rays of an electric lightbulb.” However, it is more than a “light painting” nor a series of “light paintings.” But an experience, which he considers as a medium that speaks about personal, spiritual and also ritualistic experience. Keely Orgeman interprets it as “primitive visual experience,” which can be traced back to the discourse of Plato’s cave, the origin of western philosophy of sensory experience in relation to human intelligence, where Plato uses an analogy that humans only see the reflection from a wall in a cave, and thinks that’s the real world.  

For me, Lumia really opens up the discussion of what is autonomous, what’s programmed, what’s mechanical, what’s artistic in the form of light art. The kinetic, ever-changing, non-repetitive visuals of Lumia has a life of its own, that doesn’t belong to Thomas or anyone. To Thomas or the viewers who can truly appreciate the art of Lumia, it is a privilege to witness the liveliness of a unique art form.  

Works cited:

Keely Orgeman, A Radiant Manifestation in Space (Yale University Press, 2017).