Red Bull Music asked me to write something about my time working in live visual performance, how the medium arose and where it might be headed next.

The full text is below, or you can read the article here.

Thank you everyone I interviewed:

Barney Steel, Marshmallow Laser Feast

Matt Black, Coldcut/ Ninjatune

Seiichi Saito, Rhizomatiks

Thomas Eberwein, Thomas Traum

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FULL TEXT

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Whatever Happened To The VJ?

Former VJ Guy Bingley interviews three visual artists who revolutionised gig-going.

I never wanted to be a “VJ”. When a club promoter asked me for some old Jamaican films to project behind Daddy G from Massive Attack, I’d never even heard the term before. But I could picture the big, rectangular film projection rolling and knew it would feel flat - the visuals needed to connect with the music. That’s what everyone was there for. That’s what I was there for.

I started making loops for realtime visual performance soon after that. It was 2006, there was a buzz about the idea of “VJing”, and lightweight, commercial VJ software was now available. (For that first show, I had to lug an old mixing console and two DVD players to the club in a battered suitcase. No thanks.)

Back then I was oblivious, but the breakthroughs had come thick and fast in the previous decade thanks to a network of AV artists, like Matt Black of Coldcut, who shared the same generous spirit and open-source approach. Before making his name as a hip hop DJ and label boss at Ninja Tune, Black was a computer programmer - “My first and only straight job”, he says.

Seminal AV works like Coldcut and Hexstatic’s ‘Timber’ came from a hybrid place. “It just seemed natural to apply the sorts of techniques we were using for music and DJing to visuals," Black says. "With music we’d been sampling, we’d been looping, we’d been processing, we’d been synthesising, we’d been editing sounds, and we were doing that in realtime. So it just seemed a cool thing to do to try and apply that to visuals as well.

“There was no software whereby you could sync sound and vision together in a live way. And we wanted to do things live, because that’s what we did as DJs, using hip hop DJing techniques. So we developed a bit of software called VJamm.” It was one of the world’s first pieces of commercial VJing software and worked “like a kind of piano for audiovisual clips”.

Key moments in VJing history came about through this dance between technological progress and human curiosity. Black credits the Transatlantic back-and-forth of the ‘90s rave and dance scene as an accelerator, experimenting at Brixton squat parties with Aphex Twin and sharing knowledge with performers in New York and San Francisco.

In ‘90s London, collectives like D-Fuse and The Light Surgeons assembled. In Japan, too, the idea of VJing caught fire and eventually products like motion dive .tokyo started to bundle software with mixing consoles. By the ‘00s, even entry-level VJs could feel more like DJs, twiddling knobs and sliding crossfaders to manipulate free, generic video loops in sync with the music.

That’s when I started VJing. And looking back, maybe that’s when the problems started too.

Thomas Traum, who cut his teeth with shows for M.A.N.D.Y., Numbers, and Jamie xx, captures a core VJ dilemma: “Venues will always prioritise sound over visuals by a large margin, even at big festivals. When I toured with bands or groups I operated on the basis that nothing will work nor will be in place, which was mostly true.”

For every UK spot like the Big Chill House, with its custom AV booth and preview monitors for VJs, there were hundreds of places that wouldn’t even supply a table to set up on. Or venues like the one in Glasgow that stuck its precious projector on top of a speaker, wobbling away to the bass until I caught it mid-fall.

If you were lucky enough to set up without much hassle, you were more likely to be asked ‘is this the cloakroom?’ than anything about what you were doing. Sometimes it was hard to tell if the audience appreciated the visuals any more than the promoters - but when it worked best, it could trigger the same trips as great ‘60s pioneers like The Joshua Light Show. “Sometimes I’d look up and see that actually most of the people in the club were staring at the screens, totally hypnotised by a particularly outrageous bit of psychedelic feedback or another apt image,” says Matt Black.

Since then, lightspeed jumps in the power of projectors and processing left the ‘generic’ VJ in the dust, and that’s something we should be grateful for. “Instead,” as Traum says, “every artist has some sort of custom live content. It evolved which is great. Generic visuals can kill the feeling and emotion of the music, and often don’t add anything.”

When projection mapping became possible, light shows could take on a specific spatial or architectural dimension - like Etienne De Crecy’s ‘The Cube’, Strangeloop’s holographic cocoon for Flying Lotus, or Amon Tobin’s mind-bending ‘ISAM’. In Japan, artists like Rhizomatiks have gone even more avant-garde, using the human body as a 3D canvas.

To that end, witness the brilliance of MLF’s ‘Meet Your Creator’ show with Oneohtrix Point Never, or the magic of ‘Laser Forest’ at the Barbican - both beautiful distillations of light and sound borne of their “urge to break away from the rectangular screen and engage with an audience in immersive 360 spaces”.

What we once called “VJing” left its 4:3 box, low quality rips, and screensaver aesthetic for full-stage spectacle, interplaying with sets, pyrotechnics and choreography. Practitioners have set off in every direction imaginable because they’re spoilt with new technological capabilities.

As Matt Black says: “there’s creative potential in everyone” who wants to experiment with sound and image and share their enjoyment.