EN: What is "Live Cinema" about?

I have been into "live video art" since 1999 and have played at like over 200 events in the recent years. I think I have been through pretty much anything a VJ can get through - small, cool, fun, boring, big, arty, poppy, long, short, alone, with others, on conferences, in exhebitions, at corporate events, with famous DJs, unfamous bands, hiphop, drum'n'bass, house, reaggy, rock, pop, jazz, punk, inland foreign countries, well paid, poorly paid, not paid, people spilling water over equipment, a thousand and one time being ask to change the music or turn off the light. It was a great learning experience, mostly very exhausting and mostly a lot of fun. Yet its not something I want to do the rest of my life because I do think that the "traditional" vjing metaphor has only so far to go when it comes to portray a message, when it comes to deeper meaning and juxtapositions. Also the "Club Scene" is not what it used to be anymore with money the only ruling factor - a fact conrtibuting to the "shallowness" of the scene. The most prominent "VJ superstar" Charles Kriel is a showing mainly dancing girls and is "pumping the crowd" like his DJ counterparts with gestural movements throughout his set.
I have never been the person to give in to such shallowness and was always advocating to advance the VJ scene in general - yet after all these years and seeing another "VJ top 100" I am giving up this fight for content in the VJ realm and take it to a mostly unseeded ground. The reasons are manyfold and the timing seems to be just about ripe.
Originally used to avoid the term "vj" in the main title of his book Timothy Jaeger coined a term that stuck so much in my head after the first time I heard it. "Live Cinema Unraveled" is a very thorough analyzation of the "artform" VJing on multiple levels yet the title suggest there is more to "vjing" then standing in a club and read the music and translate it into pictures. I love clubs and I like listening to music yet the club experience that I came from is vastly changed in this century and it also transformed everything associated with clubbing. It seems I am not the only one seeing this. Peter Rubin aka maxavision aka one of the pioneers of video mixing says in the opening words of his work titled "A look at video mix culture" (PDF warning):

On the one hand, participation in the contemporary VJ phenomenon is as explosive as in any art form on the planet today. Unfortunately, on the other hand, over the past decade, the genre has nonetheless regressed backwards, from its once significant art and social influence, to its present stage of trivial irrelevance.

You can also witness that in the main global virtual meeting point VJForums. Once a place that was full of discussions about the meaning of VJing and our future today you get merely advices about equipment and software - the content discussions are basically absent which means not very good things for the future of the "art". It reads more like "how do I become a VJ superstar", "How do I earn money", "Whats the coolest DJ you played with" or "I played with this super dj" or "I played at this giga event", "I have the biggest Screen", "I have the most expensive laptop", "I have the biggest resolution". The acutal VJ top 10 are mostly filled with "A/V" acts like because they are more known for their music so people voting for them did so because they heard the name on some music charts.
I have always said that I do not want to be part of that and have tried to rally against this - seemingly without much impact. For me VJing was supposed to be a media form with all responsibilities that any media brings with it. Education, opinion and social reflection are for me very high values and I see now that inside that very shallow "club dance scene" that is only about stardom and money nowadays you are running against brick walls with such a mentality. The social meaning of a counter culture only seems to exist in a very few very idealistic .orgs trying to counter the market force of todays pop culture.

Yet on the other hand you have modern pop-cultures shiny paint pealing off on all fronts. Its not visible to the majority of the population - yet. Lets look at the movie industry first. Ars Technica reports from the annual ShoWest motion picture Convention in Las Vegas. The last year saw a record drop in movie goers of 5.8% - its the third year that annual movie sales have declined in the western world (exception is Britain). George Lucas - director of the biggest popculture movie franchise in history with the Star Wars Series - said that the future of multimillion dollar movie is doomed:

The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,"... Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with 'King Kong.

This from a guy who made his fortune in exactly this industry. His prediction is that the movie budget go down to a maximum of 15 Million Dollars - about the money good indie movie are made on and about 15 times as much as the most expensive TV productions in Germany. Couple this with cinemas installing digital projectors and you have Indie Film heaven - now the question is in the room: Can Indy Films with a tens of the budget draw big audiences into theaters in droves as their Hollywood counterparts once did? The answer is a simple and devestating: NO! They will draw audiences in the theaters but the numbers will be smaller (I would suggest 10 times smaller) leading to smaller cinemas in the course of the next 10 - 15 years. The interesting question is why this decline is happening: If you ask the Studio Bosses you get the answer "We need to spend more in advertising" if you ask the movie goers with taste the answer is "The movies are bullshit". More advertisement of the films won´t do any good - but if Hollywood would find a secret recipe and all of the sudden the movies would be good in the viewers mind would the downward spiraling trend be stopped? I personally doubt it as I think society as a whole is transforming and as one of the results it has much more little time - yet movie going is extremely time intensive you sit there in a theater for like 2.5 h and cut your social life in these 2.5 h to zero you can´t talk you are stuck in a black room full of strangers and never speak a word to anyone - an experience you can get at home without spending money. People want to communicate get together exchange thoughts and movie viewing in todays cinema is not cutting it in that regard.
The whole Web 2.0 frenzy that spreads through media hits around the same chorus. People do not want to consume media anymore they want to interact with it talk about it and create it themself. They want to meet and communicate more then be bombarded with meaningless pop culture. As I don´t see a need to "hype" Web 2.0 as it seems a natural evolution rather then a revolution it hits home with me because the same can be said about any other aspect of live(except for politics - yet). People want to get out and talk and put hands on their surroundings - sitting in a black box is seen as a waste of time. The decline in TV watching, and pop CD sales is also reminiscent of this happening.
Yet Clubbing and going to concerts on the other hand doesn´t see this decline - it rather sees a bigger market then ever before. Its because people - while still being bombarded with pop culture (and don´t tell me music culture on all levels today is not pop culture) - there is space and time to actually communicate with friends and strangers - exchange ideas and have fun and being entertained all at the same time - yet the focus is on "dance entertainment" with music at its center and no matter how much the VJ throws up his arms on stage it will not be changed.
This is where Live Cinema comes in. Using the downturn of the Hollywood era cinema fusing it with the "Society 2.0" metapher and using the "Live Motion Picture Mixing" art as a foundation Live Cinema can be seen as a natural evolutionary step. How would that look like?
I see it as movie long sets (30 minutes to 3 hours max) in loungy settings - old movie theaters, bars but also see it as special event "live sets" during a dance night or as a club opener in the first boring hour of a club. Important is that the focus is shifted from music only to real audiovisual experience and that means that the musician is following the visuals as much as the visuals follow the music - a new cooperation between the cinema performer and the audio act is absolutely essential for this to happen. The set has to be prearranged as much as any live audio set is prearranged today and every concert has its order - and still considered live.
On a lower order its basically bidirectional Silent Film. Not only does the music follow the visuals as in the early movie age but media catering both senses is fluid and reacts to each other AND the audience with its surrounding.

I want to promote "Live Cinema" not as a "VJ killer" nor as a "Cinema Killer" or even a "Club/Concert Killer". I think its a complimentary media artform with its own set of rules (to be established) with its own meaning and own following. Its an addition to all those existing forms. Its something people that are part of this project are very exited about. Its an evolution that is already happening - even not under the name "Live Cinema" but - alongside the VJ culture. Its being tried out in the remix sets of "popular" VJs that swamp my mailbox at the moment. Yet the true nature can only be unraveled with full productions that could be seen as "indy" films with own stories and narratives with own footage and production because only then will it have the power to truly show the full scope of the medium (more on why I think remixes do not fully count as Live Cinema in a future article). The only way to fuse the power and the message as outlined in Peter Rubins document mentioned above is to put the screen back into focus away from pure ornamental wall decoration for the few "moving picture addicts" and into the mind of the guest to really build that bridge between performer and crowd. As Dr. Timothy Leary put it: "Its all about set and setting". The same hold true for the LSD like visual extension of the known world we call "Cinema" and "VJing" today.
I would like to see a re:definition re:branding and re:marketing of our powerful art, media and communication form to let it unfold to its full potential - something it will never reach in its current incarnation.