By Salina Christmas
11 April 2010

This is cinema, but not as we know it. Sojournposse is no VJ connoisseur – we’re photography – but we think Electrovision‘s live visual event at The Roxy, Borough, London, which took place last night, went three notches up your usual Saturday night event.

Sculpture's Reuben Sutherland drops a graphic in place. Photo: Sojournposse

Crafting with music and sounds is hard enough as it is. For instance, I don’t know what our soundsmith buddy Legopops do with their decks, Macs and amplifiers, but they can certainly generate a party out of them. Electrovision, however, is not just a bricoleur’s orchestra; it’s also a bricoleur’s cinema. The VJing, performed synchronically with the DJing, is live.

On the VJ menu last night were four artists: Silent Eclipse, Sculpture, Overlap and Fade In Fade Out.

And voila! We now have a cinema. Photo: Sojournposse

The audience was around 80 to 100 in number, but these were proper fans. They sat respectfully at their tables, watching the big screen that loomed above the empty dancefloor (nobody danced; it was cinema, remember), but the kind of cameras they whipped out to record the performances were indicative of their taste. The lowest common denominator of a model was your average point-and-shoot camera. Mr Mo, the curator, recorded the event using a Canon EOS 5D. One chap used a mini diva light (“for daybreak lighting,” I was told) and a shoulder mount (no kidding) which were fitted to his Canon EOS 7D.

Mr Mo, pictured right, with one of the photographers. That flash light is for the daytime lighting. Photo: Sojournposse

I asked Mr Mo if the VJs were directors of photography or film-makers.”Sculpture’s Reuben Sutherland is an animator,” he said, pointing to one-half of the VJ duo. The other half, Dan Hayhurst, tinkered with the sounds.

Up until I saw Sculpture performed, I had no idea your average semi-pro SLR camera could be used for that kind of artistic end. But hang on – was that really an SLR they rigged up to ‘broadcast’ the ‘animation’, or just a small handicam? It was too dark, and our iPhone evidence didn’t help.

The next graphic (see red round piece on the right) to go on the deck. Photo: Sojournposse

Basically, here’s how Sculpture does their VJ-ing: Hayhurst cooks up the music, and Sutherland animates by adding layers and layers of pre-prepared graphics printed on round pieces of paper, vinyl-sized, which he places delicately on the record deck. Each graphic went round and round, creating rapid sequences of images. Placing a different-sized paper disrupts the flow of an animation or introduces a new sub-theme to the story. All this is recorded live using the said camera, and then transposed to the screen via an overhead projector. This is basic animation, but well-designed and cleverly done. Posse Zarina, our resident Creative Director, would have loved this art.

And that's how the red piece looks like on the screen. Photo: Sojournposse

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Mr Mo remarked to our Digital Anthropology tutor as we gawped at Sculpture’s animated masterpiece. “You’d have to be meticulous to create detailed animations like that.”

Mr Mo has curated many VJ events. He aims to feature different artworks at each show to keep Electrovision fresh. I asked Mr Mo what happens if there is a cock-up during a live performance. That’s the beauty of it, he said. You make it up as you go. That evening, the cinema was projected onto one screen. Occassionally, he said, three screens would be used – one on the right and also on the left of the main screen – to project ‘landscape’ sized performances. This would provide a more ‘haptic’ experience to our visual enjoyment. That night, the images were broadcast in 4:3 format. To have the images projected in the landscape length, it would have to be in 4:1. Ooh, that’s really stretchy (checkout Gotz Goppert’s landscape images to have an idea).

No. This iPhone depiction does not do the cinema any justice. Photo: Sojournposse

Each cinematic experience incorporated visuals that were distinctively retro, or totally new. Some images from the 50s were easily identifiable, some no doubt are originals produced by our VJs. Which makes me wonder: now that the Digital Economy has been passed by clueless gits in the Parliament (“IP address” means internet protocol, not intellectual property, Mr Politician), how would that badly drafted “copyright infringement” clause affect this kind of creativity? The VJs obviously use other people’s images as their points of reference, and they certainly publish these works on their websites (via Vimeo, of course. VJs only do HDs). Are they, like us the digital artists, now vulnerable to legal prosecutions? If anything, these visual creatives support their musical brothers via their visual performances. How can this art be potentially criminal? Can you think of a mega music festival – or even something like Sonar – which doesn’t rely on VJing?

The tutor and I discussed this that night with VJ Gary Oldknow of Deep Visual, and also Mike Faulkner of D-Fuse, our 3D animator friend whom Sojournposse met at Nissan’s East Meets West exhibition for London Design Festival 2009 (see his latest work on the Jakarta History Museum – amazing!). The only way to go about this is for the visual artists – photographers, animators, illustrators and the like – to not accept playing ‘second fiddle’ anymore to music and the written art. They’ve got the law; we’ve got culture.

Music video and the world wide web would be nothing without images.

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