When VJs become VJs and VideoPerformanceArtists become VideoLiveActs
ou know I tend to use the term VJ to describe my art as many others in my field do. Its because we all are too lazy to explain to every person who walks up to us in a club what we do and VJ has been picked up by the media. If you are not following the "VJ scene" all along there was very heated debate about the term to give us about 2-3 years ago (yes that short). In the end we kinda settled with that and it has stick (with little debates in between from now and then). The problem with the term is that most of us are not like DJs playing prerecorded Records and trying to pitch adjust them to beat. Most of us are more like a live act musician - carefully crafting out our visuals over the course of the night (loops based software based etc just like different breeds of live act musicians). Its really like playing an instrument having control over almost all different aspects of our visuals, its not just pitch adjusting but recutting grouping colorizing generating etc etc.
That has two origins, first there is this long history of the synesthic art field (first mentioned by early philosopher like plato) with a boom in the 70s and 90s. Its has always been about generating the visuals to the music live. And then there is a simple fact: there was no such thing as a record player for video (yes there was one experimental one but it never really went into mass production).
The second reason has just vanished. Pioneer is brining out a pitch adjustable DVD player the DJV X1 Master. The first reason is the cause of a split in the Live Video Performance scene - which is ultimately not bad.
So what is my personal take in short? VJ´s become VJ´s or maybe even AVJ´s replacing the DJ in the long time frame by playing AVJ singles that have a beatsynced visual set on top of the prerecorded music that can be mixed just like a record. That is easy to do and to learn and the Pioneer unit will lead the way to this (dvd sound finally replacing the vinyl, as it has more audio information then a vinyl and cd combined, so it really does sound better?!), and then there will be those of us (like me) who would still like to do it all live and rather look like a dork behind a lappy in front of da big crowd but retaining the qualities of a true live set by really beeing able to change something. I would even suggest that the latter form is grouping up with the audio live acts and not even playing anymore at normal record spinning events as those can be fully suited by the AVJs.
The best thing of all is that those with the skillz and the knowledge now can finally produce for this strong market ones it is in place, you know produce AVJ singles (coupled with the audio guys).
And finally let me make one thing clear. It is harder to do a good visual mix then to do a good audio mix even so some things might look good there is a quality in it and that is not learned overnight.
