James Snow, aka VJ Snow, resident vj at Istanbul's House Music club, The Hall, wrote a two page article on Live Cinema for this month's issue of TIMEOUT Istanbul, interviewing most of the local scene's active visualists, along with those that have passed through the city in the last year from parts far and wide on the map. With James' kind permission, we reprint the article in full here at AE.
“Live Cinema” in Clubland! More than Meets the Eye
As pundits continue to quibble over whether or not cinema is dead, James Snow reports on a new live cinema that’s alive and kicking.
Admittedly most of us go to the clubs for the most mundane of reasons: to hear the music we like or something new, to get our rocks off and socialize and possibly show off our impeccable wardrobe and sense of style and hopefully score – maybe even remembering it the next morning. The flashing colorful lights – often literal robots though still ostensibly under the control of a human – add a crucial visual element to the audio universe we’ve entered. However, for sometime the best clubs have added a new dimension to the clubbing experience. Whether it be a rock band – now that back-to-basics, guitar rock has made a major comeback – or a superstar Dj, or a jazz trio providing a live soundtrack to a classic silent film, visuals have returned, adding a third element to the music and the lights.
Visuals in clubs have taken a number of forms. Some clubs are content to install one projector and rectangular or square screen, whereas others quadruple the number of projectors and screens – or go for the largest screen possible - and others liberally cover the walls in plasma screens depending on their budgets. The most basic, down and out dive might ask the Vj to bring his own projector, but set up a white sheet for him to display his work.
At its most boring the visual element is something along the lines of the audio visualizer provided by Windows Media Player, or a DVD player, which the light guy/gal will stick a movie into from time to time regardless of whether it fits the music or not. This saves the club money by eliminating the need for someone to actually prepare and mix something live, namely, a VJ, but Vjs who have started mixing their visuals and the effects they apply to them with new apps that monitor the audio and respond to it in perfect synch create a far cooler club experience. Not content with rave culture’s garish, if colorful e-induced abstractions, fractals and primitive 3d tunnels, they have also begun mashing up and remixing TV, cinema and visual pop culture in general. They are editing and assembling visual compositions right before out eyes - in tune and in time - and some of them even have storylines.
Whether or not you agree with art house director Peter Greenaway’s announcement last year that cinema is dead or not, there is no doubt that celluloid is now only one choice in the 21st century’s story teller or visualist’s palette and the new generation, the so-called screenagers, who grew up with laptops in their cots, are quite happy to accept the new digital world and it’s much more accessible means of production and viewing. Pro-LSD, hippy guru, Timothy Leary, was said to have commented that the only way to prepare for the digital age was by consuming large quantities of psycho-active drugs. Well, that may be the case for the old guard, but the younger set takes to paradigm shifts, like the way an iphone makes calls, with ease, and doesn’t need to get high to get it.
Returning to Greenaway, his exact date for the death of cinema was 1983, just five years before Jean-Luc Godard, who was one of the first of the great directors to begin experimenting with video, began work on his epic, made-for-TV “Histoires du Cinema”, which noted movie critic, Jonathon Rosenbaum has called the “Finnegan’s Wake” of cinema, and for those of who have never read Joyce’s gin-fueled, near impenetrable text, or the non-Irish readers who have no idea what a wake is, let me spell it out simply, it is a kind of party that follows a death.
"Cinema's death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art," he told a director's masterclass.*
Interactive, multi-media art…Hmmm? Well, that’s one way of describing the new live cinema of Vjs like Spark, aka Toby Harris, who was invited by resident VJ collective “artificialeyes.tv” to perform at Yeni Melek Performans Merkezi last year. He puts it this way:
“The world is catching up with VJs in enjoying a spot of real-time video manipulation… ‘Live Cinema’ is something close to my heart though: I reckon you can specifically and deliberately combine a lot of what’s good in established cinema and clubbing to give a completely new way of expressing yourself as a VJ-esque performer while engaging with the audience’s own creative thoughts. The key to it is an improvisational use of narrative, rather than forcing a fixed story down their throats, you could be a cinematic incarnation of the oral storytellers of old, weaving tales on the fly, or providing the scenarios and juxtapositions that people find themselves compulsively mapping their own narratives onto.” **
Spark probably pays as much mind to dark musing on the cinema’s demise of the elder statesmen of cinema as the townspeople do to the madman who announces the death of God in Nietzsche’s “La Gaya Scienza”.
Locally, Baba Zula’s songs, often narrative in nature, are brought to life visually by the “live drawing” on a Wacom tablet attached to a MacBookPro of artist and band member Ceren Oykut. Houses, naked bodies, trees, tigers and all sorts of other objects related to the performance appear and are wiped away to be replaced by other objects on the fly as the concert transpires. I asked her about the state of audio-visual art in Istanbul:
“It’s becoming more and more interactive - which is very important - with live music, sometimes videos are not more than a colorful decor behind the bands. Artists have to work more on the concept of the music to be able to tell more stories and have their own audience (or visitors?)
I don’t consider myself as a VJ. What I do is just drawing. I’m not mixing more than one source. I just have 1 source which is just the drawing in Photoshop. This makes me a real time performer, maybe someone who makes a shadow theater (hayali)”
Another world class “visualist” (many Vjs find the term ‘VJ’ demeaning), who recently spent six months mixing visuals here in Istanbul, is “Jean Poole”, aka Sean Healy, an Australian who has done much for the VJ scene there and is no stranger to the concept of live cinema. In fact, when I asked him about his favorite acts here he divided them thus:
“Best consideration of the overall lighting environment - artificialeyes.tv,
Best original content – ‘Cotton’,
Best performance style - VJ Pascal Lesport.”
TOIST interviewed artificialeyes.tv in 2006 and they also praised Cotton, a duo comprising two of their former VJ workshop students, Ozan Akıncı and Kaya Hacaloğlu. Michael Parenti and Todd Thille of ae.tv singled them out for their use of narrative. Cotton did a 50 minute piece in Yeni Melek Performans Merkezi and in their words, “they kicked our ass.” It was Turkey’s first film, edited on the fly and it rocked. They were so impressed that they brought Cotton with them to perform at a gig in Berlin. I contacted the duo recently in India and they replied with their take on the AV scene in Istanbul:
“As Cotton AV we've seldomly performed in the few venues here in Istanbul... we've been thriving (sic) our way through the concept Live Cinema, that is creating a non-linear story, a narrative through improvisation, whether it's affected by live music or live consciousness. What we're trying to achieve is to simply create a world where we could improvise our visuals with that of music in a narrative story- the only difference is the visuals is being done live and on-the-spot concept wise. This is a concept what we call "Live Cinema". A narrative story created live, affected live by the music that is playing. There are a few venues where we're trying to perform here in Istanbul, to name a few : Galata Perform, Kargart, Dogzstar, and Yeni Melek. Of course there are others, but they are not the place where we could perform likewise, whether it's concept wise, or musically wise fit to theconcept of Cotton AV. Turkey is a very young VJ country for the world. Since 15 years it's been trying to produce live visuals. Like artists like Artificial Eyes TV, and longtime 2/5 BZ and Ali Demirel, and young new comers such as Candas Sisman.”
Turkish Vjs are no longer confined to Istanbul. “Abstre”, for example, are now based in Berlin and their best show last year took place in Tokyo. A show with the legendary Dj Richie Hawtin in Istanbul actually turned into a fiasco, as the club was unprepared for visuals. An Abstre member praised artificialeyes.tv for all they’ve done to jumpstart the local scene and support local AV acts, but aesthetically, he said thier tastes were “different, more minimal, settled and conceptual”. For him the best live visual act in istanbul last year was Ceren Oykut's for Baba Zula.
Abstre has been around since 2002 and is well known for its performances in clubs and at electronic music parties, but also for its involvement with well-known Turkish rock singers and groups like Şebnem Ferah, Mor ve Ötesi, Pentagram and Çilekeş. With expressive video performances performed with these artists, Abstre has reached more than 2,000,000 people. The video “abstre.audiovisual” (the name they use as a collective), made for Çilekeş's Kürar, is described by the collective as “the most advanced sample of Turkish rock music and live visuals” www.cilekesonline.com Abstre.audiovisual is one of the founders of Istanbul International Animation Festival, as well, and organizes audiovisual workshops for university students. This is good news as ae.tv’s workshop is now defunct, as is, sadly, the Live Cinema Series they were curating at the Yeni Melek performance space last year.
For my own part, working under the monickers of “Vj Mixer Monster Mash”, “x static”, and, currently, the simple “vJ. Snow”, I’ve been thrilled to participate in the city’s VJ scene. I’ve been lucky enough to secure a residency at popular house music club, the Hall, after a year of messing about with psych-punkadelic rockers, Dinar Bandosu, who could barely afford to pay my taxi fare to and from gigs. Though my ambitions are not as grandiose as some of the artists mentioned above, I do believe there is an art in what I do. It is mainly mashups of movies, modified TV grabs, public domain loops and other ephemera, but it requires intuition, a basic sense of color theory and rhythm, various software apps and hardware (including a host of cables and adaptors for every occasion) and the endurance to keep up with Djs sets that often continue after 4am. A long history of playing around with Adobe After Effects and various non-linear editing programs and a background in film history doesn’t hurt, though I’m no code monkey. I go diggin’ for rare films which I then sample just like Djs who search the globe for rare records to incorporate into their sets. It can get pretty obsessive. I also have started using one or two live camera feeds so I can include the audience and/or Dj in the visual mix and apply effects to those images. Most people seem to enjoy seeing themselves up on the screen mixed to the beat with other eye candy. It’s a laugh when people actually start playing up for the camera or let loose for the silver screen.
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines cinema as “the art or technique of making motion pictures”. What Vjs are doing are (re) mixing motion pictures. It may be done freestyle or prepared according to a concept or aesthetic of some kind, but the dope shit is always mixed in real time. Recently, I performed with “Yakup”, the rock group chosen by MTV Türkiye to represent the country at the last MTV European MTV awards in Munich. The group and I chose about 60 or 70 abstract visuals that we thought fit the band’s overall sound or particular songs and the atmosphere at Babylon we created, even with the club’s mere two screens, was something the lighting person could never have produced on his own. At another party at Ghetto, the light man actually interfered with the “Blade Runner (1982)” inspired sci-fi visuals or washed them out completely with his obtuse, robotic, clumsy effects. When cinema is being (re)created/(re)mixed before your very eyes who wants a light person to blow out the images with all the subtlety of a coal pile in a ballroom.
Undoubtedly, cinema is going to have to evolve or die an ignominious death? Festival goers this month might not give a flying fuck, but Greenaway, who incidentally like fellow director, Mike Figgis (of “Leaving Las Vegas” fame), has experimented with real time movie making using a touch screen and customized VJ app rather than an editing suite, would not share their sentiments. Other comments Greenaway made recently were "If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, its tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain dead," and traditional movies are just “bedtime stories for adults.” He said video artist, Bill Viola, was worth “10 Martin Scorseses” as “Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that [the pioneering director] DW Griffiths was making early last century.”
Speaking of Griffith, DJ Spooky, aka Paul D. Miller, who also visited and VJed last year at the Live Cinema Series, has created an entire remix of DW Griffith’s infamous “The Birth of a Nation”. Djs are realizing too that visuals needn’t just be a sideshow and can in fact be incorporated to stunning effect in their own sets. Live cinema appeals to people because of the accelerated lifestyles we lead as well. As I wrote in TOIST last year, you might be “a cinema enthusiast or culture vulture, but, like most of us, you don’t have the time or will to sit down and watch the whole of D.W. Griffith’s infamous, if seminal, cinematically pioneering, 187 minute, 1915 film, “Birth of a Nation”. To some the prospect of watching this racist epic might be about as appealing as dental surgery – and not just because of its content (the romanticizing of the Klu Klux Klan’s establishment by southerners in the US, humiliated by their defeat in the civil war and threatened by the liberated blacks). It’s also lengthy, silent and black and white, without the lasting appeal or laughs of a Chaplin or Buster Keaton flick. But fear not. DJ Spooky, a.k.a. “That Subliminal Kid”, a.k.a. Paul D. Miller, has sampled, looped and remixed the movie in triptych format which may even hold the attention of the post MTV, ADD generation, as well as creating new readings of Griffith’s notorious founding myth.”
Vjs are on the rise, both in Istanbul and abroad, and the technology is becoming easier and easier for everyone to participate in the instant creation and consumption of movies. So where is it all going? “The VJ, almost unwittingly, is mutating and evolving our present form of cinematic storytelling.”*** So step aside traditional cinema. You had a long eventful life, but now, at over 100 years old, perhaps it’s time for you to stop trying to hold onto your old mechanical-age ideas and finally hand the reins over to the brave new digital world.
At the end of the day though, the AV artists we most enjoy are in it for the fun – not the commercial production of DVDs/loops, or the chance to move from club to art gallery (a common evolution). With female Vjs like Miss Pinky and Holly Daggers, to name just two, joining the international roster of talent, this has long since stopped being just a guy thing as well. As Matt Black of the UK duo, Coldcut, told me on his last visit here:
“It’s still statistically a geeky interest, but it is crossing over. Remember… VJing includes the whole of DJing…Generally the music often comes first…Music isn’t going away. This is just an expansion of music…so it’s electronic arts we’re talking about, real time electronic arts, to bring it back to the way you started off…I call this the new hip hop. It’s just a catch phrase, but I feel there’s something there…hip hop fuses together and VJing fuses together so we can take any type of performance or material and synthesize it into a new type of show. So it’s not really even a form. It’s more like a system of extremely powerful techniques.”
Clubs that feature visuals locally Babylon, Dogzstar Ghetto Indigo, Peyote Roxy Studio live and The Hall
* “Greenaway announces the death of cinema - and blames the remote-control zapper”
The Independent (UK); Wednesday, 10 October 2007
** From an interview posted on the audio-visual blog “skynoise”; www.skynoise.net
*** www.dv.com online magazine news article; “The Rise of the VJ”
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