Philosophy and cultural theory of vjing and realtime interactiVE PERFORMANCE

If you've been looking for ideas around VJing, Interactive art or any real time interaction processes, then you've found the right web page.

Here the questions which are faced every day by practitioners are 'unpicked' by some of the foremost academics and VJs/Artists working today.

This section of vjtheory.net is specifically about the forthcoming book. Here you will find extracts of articles to be published in the book and, in phases 2 and 3 of the project, experimental and collaborative works, comments and dialogues about the articles and responses by the authors.

Full articles, which do not appear in the book, are available in the project/community part of the site (the red pages). Here you'll also find links to other work which relates to the subject areas, such as the philosophical traditions which are drawn upon by contributors in their articles.

Given the predominantly 'digital media' qualities of the area, a book might be seen as a strange contribution to the material available. However, a recurring theme at related festivals and symposia is the lack of useful academic texts which explore the questions faced by practitioners when examining their own or others practice.

These include:

Ethical and political contexts and appropriate analytical tools to examine them.

Textual and Experiential contexts and the relationship between work/performer and the audience. This also engages in psychoanalytic and social perspectives as tools of analysis.

The philosophical perspectives used by contributors are very broad and present a good overview of appropriate methods and ways to work through the questions these practices raise.

Contributors also touch upon areas such as connectivity and collaborative working and the roles of a variety of 'open source' approaches to licensing work.

This is phase one of the project. New material will be posted regularly up to and after the date of publication for the book.

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Keywords

methodology, physical methodology, time, number-image, process, anti-product, realtime processing, politics, body, beingness, identities, the moment/nowness, authorship, synaesthesia, genders, immersion, spaces, phenomenology, communities, connectivity, situationism, religion, telepresence, aesthetics/ anti-aesthetics, performance, audience.

Extracts from articles

(these extracts are currently unedited)

VJing and Live A/V Practices by Andrew Bucksbarg
Narrative Motors by Eugenio Tisselli
The Number-Image by Gabriele Buzzi
The Contrary of the Movie Theater by Gabriel Menotti
The Art as Research by Janez Strehovec
Excerpts from 'Portrait of a VJ' by Mark Amerika
The Aura of the Digital by Michael Betancourt
VJ scene: Spaces With Audiovisual Scores by Patrícia Moran

Provisional structure

Methodology and narrative
Physical technology
Identity
Authorship
Communities (aesthetics, performance and audience)
Immersion, time and space

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Referenced theorists

Bruno Latour
Deleuze and Guattari
George Bataille
Guy Debord
Hakim Bey
Janet H. Murray
Jean Baudrillard
Lev Manovich
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Marshall McLuhan
Michel Foucault
Walter Benjamin

Referenced books

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, The MIT Press
A central text in the study of digital media. Places new media in relation to older, for example cinematic, media. Much more than this it analyzes the production of meaning in digital artefacts which are still being developed and consequently derive their significance from more familiar forms.

Rolando Perez, On An(archy) & Schizoanalysis, Autonomedia
The author goes through Nietzsche's philosophy and Bataille, Deleuze and Guatarri ideas of the body without organs and rhizomic relationships to talk about social anarchism and art as everyday live actions.

Sheryl Garratt, Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture, Headline Book Publishing
This book gives an overview of the history of club culture. Although the emphasis is on music and drugs rather than visuals, a feeling of space and of the environment can be grasped.

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Keywords
Extracts from articles
Provisional structure
Referenced theorists
Referenced books