VJing

A video jockey at work

A VJ is a performance artist who creates moving visual art (often video) on large displays or screens, often at events such as concerts, nightclubs and music festivals, and usually in conjunction with other performance art. This results in a live, multimedia performance that can include music, actors or dancers as well as live and pre-recorded video. Also sometimes called "Realtime" or "Realtime Video."

Technology

Often using a video mixer, VJs blend and superimpose various video sources into a live motion composition. In recent years, electronic musical instrument makers have begun to make specialty equipment for VJing.

Hardware

EDIROL V-4 Videomixer

VJing developed initially by performers using video hardware such as videocameras, video decks and monitors to transmit improvised performances with live input from cameras and even broadcast TV mixed with pre-recorded elements. This tradition lives on with many VJs using a wide range of hardware and software available commercially or custom made for and by the VJs.

VJ hardware can be split into categories -

• Source hardware generates a video picture which can be manipulated by the VJ, e.g. video cameras and Video Synthesizers.
• Playback hardware plays back an existing video stream from disk or tape based storage mediums, e.g. VHS tape players and DVD players.
• Mixing hardware allows the combining of multiple streams of video e.g. a Video Mixer
• Effects hardware allows the adding of special effects to the video stream, e.g. Colour Correction units
• Output hardware is for displaying the video signal, e.g. Video projector, LED wall, or Plasma Screen.

History

The first written use of the word "video jockey" was used on the paycheck of Merrill Aldighieri in May 1980. She had been improvising live interpretations of the DJ music 8 hours per night for several weeks in an experiment to create a visual component to the music and lightshows in the club, using the newly installed video system which had TV monitors throughout the club hanging from the ceiling. Her studies in film with such innovators in animation and sound as Stan Brackage and Michael Snow, and her apprenticeship at Rhombex Studios in NYC using the first video synthesier in the late 70ies prepared her for this natural evolution of art and teqnology. She continued Vjing in several nightclubs in NYC through the 80ies and then became active in producing finished music video oriented programs for Sony, MTV, and experimental films and animations for PBS. She occasionally tours with highlights from her archives and continues to experiemnt in multi-media production.

To keep things in perspective one can note that the first television image broadcast was by Philo Taylor Farnsworth in 1929. In the 1950s during the height of live TV innovators like Ernie Kovacs made artful use of technology and worked with a live audience to expand what the medium could do. However, as TV became more and more produced, it became more conservative and the chance to experiment live became less and less.

With the advent of the first audio synthesiers built by Bell Labs in the '70s, image synthesizing was not far behind. An artist retreat in Owego New York called Experimental Television Center, founded in 1971, made contributions to the development of many artists by gathering the experimental hardware donated by such video art pioneers as Nam June Paik and Steve Rutt and made the equipment available to artists in a retreat setting where they could experiment freely. Much of this work was debued at the nightclub Hurrah which quickly became a new alternative outlet for video artists who could not get their avant garde productions aired on regular broadcast outlets. Similar music video evolution was happening in other major cities around the world and an underground alternative to TV developed in the nightclubs.

In the 1980s the development of relatively cheap transistor and integrated circuit technology allowed the development of digital video effects hardware at a price point within the reach of individual VJs and nightclub owners. One of the first commercially distributed video synthesisers available in 1981 was the "CEL Electronics Chromascope" sold for use in the developing nightclub scene.

The Fairlight Computer Video Instrument (CVI), first produced in 1983, was revolutionary in this area, allowing complex digital effects to be applied in real time to video sources. The CVI became popular amongst television and music video producers and features in a number of music videos from the period. The Commodore Amiga introduced in 1985 made a breakthrough in accessibility for home computers and developed the first computer animation programs for 2D and 3D animation that could produce broadcast results on a desktop computer.

Early desktop editing systems such as the NewTek Video Toaster for the Amiga computer were quickly put to use by VJs seeking to create visuals for the emerging rave scene, whilst software developers began to develop systems specifically designed for live visuals such as O'Wonder's Bitbopper.

The first known software created for VJs was Vujak - written for the Mac by EBN artist Brian Kane for use by the video art group he was part of - Emergency Broadcast Network.

Broadcasters by this point had become interested and a TV series on the UK's Channel 4 called Transambient, produced by UK artists Addictive TV put the art of the VJ on national television for the first time. A similar series called Two-Step soon also appeared on German channel VIVA.

The first commercially available and heavily produced VJ software was Motion Dive from Japanese company Digital Stage. By the late 90s there were several PC based VJing software available, including generative visuals programs such as MooNSTER, Aestesis and Advanced Visualization Studio, as well as video clip players such as ArKaos and VJamm. These new software products meant that VJs were now regularly taking computers to gigs.

The 90s also saw the development of a number of digital video mixers such as the Panasonic WJ-MX50 and WJ-AVE5. Although these mixers were designed for home video editing and low budget TV production, they were quickly adopted by VJs as the core component of their performance setups. Initially, video mixers were used to mix pre-prepared video material from VHSplayers and live camera sources, and later to add the new computer software outputs into their mix.

In 1998, Roland / Edirol released the V5 Video Canvas, which was a hybrid device featuring solid state storage of still images combined with a basic video mixer. The V5 marked an important transition point, where large music corporations saw an emerging market for video performance hardware. The products that followed the V5 have become the mainstay of VJ hardware setups.

In 2001, Roland / Edirol released the V4 Video mixer, which was arguably the first video mixer designed specifically for VJ use. It features MIDI control to enable integration with digital music equipment, and quickly became adopted as the standard VJ mixer. The V4's popularity lead other music companies (notably Korg and Pioneer) to develop hardware designed specifically for VJs.

Today's VJs have a wide choice of off the shelf hardware products, covering every aspect of visuals performance, including video sample playback (Korg Kaptivator), real-time video effects (Korg Entrancer), scratchable DVD players (Pioneer DVJ-X1 and Pioneer DVJ-1000) and 3D visual generation (Edirol CG8).

See also

• Video art
• Music visualization
• Video scratching
• Liquid light shows
• Live event visual amplification