Ana
Your book 'META/DATA' was released by MIT Press in May (2007). While reading the presentation of the book on the MIT website, one sentence in particular stood out 'Amerika documents the emergence of new media art forms while he creates them'. This is perhaps because I have recently seen you creating work and being very excited and curious about the technologies you use. But it also goes back to the time I read the excerpt from 'Portrait of a VJ', which is one of the texts published in this new book. In it you relate VJing with narrative and personal history. At the same time you document your life, describe the lifestyle of the VJ, together with the process of producing work (footage and playing).

As an artist and theorist you are part of a net art history. VJing seems to be an emergent topic on your writing and I would like to know how all this comes together: video, net art, VJing, narrative, fiction and theory?

Mark
First, Ana, I would like to say that I am a big fan of your site, VJ Theory. A lot of theory these days is very predictable. It tends to be very insular and targeted at an academically oriented audience that forgets that artists, creative writers, and performers all have their own developing "theories" as well.

Maybe the better word is "poetics" (META/DATA's subtitle is "A Digital Poetics").

The first two sections of the book, entitled "Spontaneous Theories" and "Distributed Fictions" are meant to remix fictional narrative, artist theory, and something like pseudo-autobiography. It's not documentary-styled autobiography but collage-styled memoir that pieces together both my own experience as an internationally travelling artist-writer-VJ as well as quotes, ideas, and stylized phrasings from my primary network. I guess some people might call it autoethnography but my own story is too dominant for it to be that too.

You are right that the book traces a kind of shift in my work from net art to VJ and/or live A/V performance. But to me it's all fluid because I really feel like I am somehow generating these transitions by actively engaging myself in many simultaneous scenes. So, for example, there was a shift for me in the early Nineties from radical novel writing (I have published two novels, The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood) to more multimedia, hypertext narratives that, with the explosion of interest in the Internet, led to my work being embraced by the visual art world as a new form of contemporary art we have since come to call net art. I have made many works of net art including my major trilogy which consists of GRAMMATRON, PHON:E:ME, and FILMTEXT. FILMTEXT was commissioned by Playstation 2 and the ICA in London as part of my net art retrospective there in 2001-2002. The point being, out of nowhere, after releasing FILMTEXT online, I got invited to do two performance related tours of FILMTEXT, one in Europe and one in Japan, and this was great timing because the idea of performing, instead of merely presenting, my net art works had been on my mind for quite some time, especially since I thought the works in my main net art trilogy were in fact quite performative in and of themselves and invited participatory performance from whoever chose to interact with them.

I decided that I would really switch it up and invited my sound collaborator Twine to join me on these two tours which he agreed and I decided to do the visuals and he worked on the sounds. A question immediately presented itself to me: “How should I perform my net art visuals in a live setting?” Well, I had a large library of QuickTime movies that were mostly made of manipulated images from the FILMTEXT website, digital video images that I had shot all over the world, especially near my home in Hawaii, the Australian Outback, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and they somehow screamed for potential remixing. The idea of the laptop VJ was becoming very interesting to me, especially with simple programs like Arkaos but also more experimental programs like VDMX. Remember, this was like late 2001, early 2002! So Twine and I went on the road with our laptops, our source material, and a willingness to learn everything on the fly -- while on tour! I was literally learning how to be a VJ in the hotel room two nights before the first tour in Japan was to start. It ended up being one of the best series of gigs I have ever performed.

As is always the case with me, as I began VJ touring for the next three years, I kept taking notes and writing about what it felt like to "become" a VJ -- in this case, VJ Persona -- and the writing was a mix of fiction, artist poetics, image rhythm theory, etc. Since the transition from net artist to VJ was seamless, the net art poetics I had been generating between 1995-2002 was still stimulating my thinking too -- so I was able to blend them together into what I called digital flux personas, where the central character in my “fictional poetics” could become many things at once – a net artist, theorist, VJ, Professor, novelist, whatever. In the end, VJ Persona became a kind of playah.

BTW, how is VJ Theory developing? What is it turning in to?

Ana

VJ Theory becomes more of a community everyday. If it started with the idea of compiling the book, now the organic, live creation and evolution becomes as relevant. We travel more than ever before, meeting people and presenting the project. Every time we leave Falmouth, our isolated but beautiful location, we experience the impact the project has on people. When we put contributors in contact with each other, we feel overwhelmed by what is happening as a community.

The way we understood this work, at the beginning, was as the two of us as the editors and then our collaborators. We are a sort of entity with a single voice but a voice that respects individual divergences and opinions, like a mythical animal with two heads.

The Small Projects we organize on vjtheory.net, aim at creating collaborative theoretical works reflecting on VJing and realtime interactive practices. We are creating structures for people to come and write 'artist theories' as you describe it. Theory that is as creative as these practices. It is since we started to make these Small Projects that the entity has been changing. We are sometimes two (as D&G say in the introduction to A 1000 Plateaus) but sometimes we are a lot more. This identity changes in number. The time I strongly felt this was at the Intercontinental chat organized by TEAS in Vancouver. We were doing a video chat with people there onsite and another one online with people from Europe, LA and Australia. The conversation was on the subject of ways to make possible collaborative writing and suddenly I felt we were all actually thinking as a single entity, proposing possibilities, as VJ Theory.

Something that I find common in our interests is the subject of the persona. Entities, collective individualities and the expansion of individuals into several personas (either with the use of pseudonyms or as something a lot more complex), all these are to my views constructions of fictional selves, which are a lot more real that a 'linear' self (if that exists at all). This blend of 'digital flux personas', as you call it, can be seen in every aspect of these practices; VJs come from many areas of knowledge (programming, design, philosophy, illustration, sound, writing, engineering, science, etc, to meet and merge at a performative point. This is possibly what will increasingly drive current and future theoretical works.

What are your ideas on the future of the VJ as performer and persona? Will she, he or they be a theorist/reflective thinker as much as a practitioner? And are we closer to a point of convergence of philosophy and art?

Mark
Yes, as I suggest in META/DATA, the artist is the medium is the message. And yet this entity (as you call it), this persona, the artist-medium, is in flux and capable of multiple becomings. In the book I am investigating the way artist-mediums conduct random acts of "multiple persona simultaneity" – something I saw happening with with the so-called “characters” in my early novels too. Then, after experimenting with new media technologies and ramping up my spontaneous artist theories, I started bringing these ideas into VJ performance as well.

When writing the new section of the book, Spontaneous Theories, I found that the figure of the VJ was perfect for my philosophical investigations. In this way, the VJ I am compositing in my narrative, is not an eye-candy salesman at doof-doof club events.

I do acknowledge these other kinds of VJs and like to go to clubs as much as anyone looking for a good time out in the social network, but the VJ I propose is more of a nomadic net artist who hyperimprovisationally taps into their readiness potential by triggering the neural mechanism that leads to unconscious creative activity. In this way, the VJ is more of a remixologist, someone who affectively mixes their memories, personal narratives, fantasies, and just-in-time autohallucinations into one string of events. This VJ I am conjuring up is part philosopher too, and is capable of rendering into vision a new kind of life style practice (LSP) that inmixes the Real with the Unreal and turns their live sets into a kind of performative dreambook composed of spontaneous situations made out of on-the-fly manipulated imagery. The performative aspect of the gig is to try and sync your in-flux persona(s) with the social network of the moment. You do this by quite literally becoming the rhythms your personas embed in muscle memory while playing before a live audience. It's like Miles Davis once said: "Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself." As a VJ, this “playing like yourself” is essential. That other jazz great, Ornette Coleman recently said that after all of these years he’s still surprised to hear that people think you can learn how to play. He never knew where that came from since, for him, you need to play to play. I agree …

BTW, do you fully understand the difference between what we call VJ performance and the Live A/V scene? Is one subsumed by the other? Or do they take place in parallel to each other as two distinct performance art related practices or could they be conceived as somewhat similar but with varying approaches to methodology?

Ana
The relation between net art and VJing is very interesting due to the potential of the medium and the tools available. Net art, as well as VJing, has the potential to make the audience/users part of the work. These interactions or dialogues can happen in so many ways.

Performers are communicators, the media and the message, emotionally engaging with the audience by taking spontaneous visual directions, from within themselves. Because of this state of forgetting oneself, or becoming the persona, the performer archives a sort of a trance, becoming one with the music, with the dance and with the people we share the space with.

The more I read and talk about these issues the more I am aware of how broad these definitions of VJ and AV are. Not sure, but maybe this is because they are not fixed and therefore, each one of us is free to make up our own definitions, based on our experience as performers and as viewers. With VJ Theory's first Small Project, 'What is VJing and realtime interaction" we were asking collaborators to send us their own ideas. This way we wanted to demonstrate the diversity we were finding in papers we were receiving. The definitions open up to an extensive diversity, rather than narrow down to a definition. The resultant collection so far, demonstrates this diversity of definitions but also of practices and approaches.

VJ Theory, as a project, is looking at interactive realtime practices because VJing is changing. Clubs are perhaps the most reluctant places to accept changes in this area though. This may be because of the physical structure, the placement of equipment, the location of the performers and what is expected from the audience (to drink and have a good time dancing). New places are being used for AV and visual performance as well as new ways of using technologies and knowledge(s). VJs are now using galleries as well, which are more versatile spaces and work with programmers, other visual artists, musicians, etc. These are the practitioners questioning what they are because they are constantly exploring and changing.
Free Jazz is an area within music that looks at the musician, the technique and the technology to produce unique performances. We can play visuals that are meaningful to us, but how about that transcendent energy that we receive as audience that is so fascinating with free jazz, can we find it in visual performance?
In other words, have you experienced a moment of energy through someone's visuals that is so unique, so overwhelming as a free jazz music experience (or other kind of improvised music experience)?

Mark
Definitely. Seeing some of the sets while playing with Johnny Dekam the Light Surgeons were mind-blower, and some of the Armageddon Audio VJ mixes we performed in Tokyo were taking over my body even as I supposedly conducted them myself. I tried to repeat these experiences when I went back to my studio in Colorado. After a major VJ tour I would be in my studio in Boulder and begin recording live VJ sessions which I would then edit/remix for those for the DVD/surround-sound installations that I ended up exhibiting all around the world. That series of DVD artworks is called CODDWORK and will on exhibition at Scope Miami in December 2007. After exhibiting CODEWORK at various venues around the world, I found that the museum and gallery directors were giving me similar feedback, telling me that they had never seen half of the people who came to see my work enter their venues and that they would park themselves in the installation for and hour or two at a time -- and the loop was usually only eight minutes long! Apparently, a lot of them were ravers. Which makes sense to me, since my VJ work (and the poetics that grew out of it, especially the spontaneous artist theory that you see in a book like META/DATA) investigates the role of non-drug induced hallucinations as a kind of body-brain-apparatus achievement.

Ana
Artists theory is relevant to both theory and practice developing together because, obviously, artists do think as they make and what they make is informed by ideas (in different degrees, depending on who and which work we are talking about). On the other hand the way some practitioners articulate their thoughts may not fit in to the most rigorous academic structure of thought, it is rather a reflection of their own creativity. This creativity of the written word that comes from the mixture of theory and practice is fascinating. Your book META/DATA is a fantastic example of this. In the book you combine personal experiences, described as if you were telling us a story, with theory, yours and other practices and the lives of others you find on your way, like a reflective journey through life as art practice, changing from one area to another, experiencing different approaches.

Seems like narrative is what puts all your work together, historically, as an invisible wire conductor. It's actually through your texts on narrative that I first came across your work by the way, together with your net art work Grammatron.

Mark
That's partly why I refer to Kaprow's "Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life" and Miles Davis' investigation of style. Remixing those two together, I come up with Life Style Practice (LSP). What is LSP? It’s like making up your story as you go along but then layering it with input from your primary social network so that it grows into something bigger than you and is not necessarily uni-directional but more interactive and open to manipulation. In Hawaii, we call that talkstory. I think part of my approach to living my life as an artist has been assisted by developing skills that allow me to blur narrative and rhetoric. If you think about it, storytelling is a great way to make an argument and a lot of that depends on the formal innovation of the language, the syntax, as well as the creative defamiliarization of what is common in discourse while maintaining your optimum narrative momentum.

That’s why my VJ sets are more like storytelling than eye-candy. Mainstream VJing is different; almost the exact opposite. In most VJ work, you start off with The Total Disconnect. It's just seemingly random images being remixed for "coolness factor" or adding just the right touch of pretty wallpaper to the evening event which, more times than not, features a DJ. That's OK, but I prefer to tell stories, even if they are anti-narrative stories like the ones I write for my novels. I try to make this happen not via technology per se but by customizing various filters that I have used in my novels, films, hypertexts, etc. It's a great challenge but that's what I like about it.

Ana
When you refer to your process of learning how to VJ, by doing it, in your hotel room and on stage, that reminds me of my own process of learning, very much the same way, by doing it on stage and if related to my Internet based work, through developing projects, for me or other people . I think this is a process common to a lot of VJs (as well as programmers and web designers, for example). Although you can test your footage and your software at home, there is more to a performance than that, like for example, technically, the image projected, the space the image is projected and most important, how the images are seen together with the music and by the audience. These elements of the performance you only have together in the performance, you can only learn them by playing live.

Mark
That's it. Ornette nailed it when he said: "I didn't know you had to learn how to play. I thought you had to play to play." It's as simple as that.

Ana
It's fascinating how our brains react both as performers and as audience of a realtime performance. I would like to have someone from medical research interested in publishing a text at VJ Theory about that. Once I had a very good conversation about the physical impact of images on the audience and our responsibility as the visual performers, creators of those images. It was with Elsa Veira, during the Mapping Festival in Geneva (May 2007). We were talking about things like the content and also about the flicker of the projected light.

Mark
That’s a fantastic idea. I wonder how brain and behavioural scientists might be able to image the brain as it experiences a VJ flicker. Somehow I think the VJ imagery itself is more powerful but the data could be used to try and locate areas of the brain where improvisation, intuition, and the creative unconscious trigger images and allow for image projections that come from The Deep Interior. But my guess is that their technology is not sophisticated enough to perform these scientific functions. Too bad too, because it could open up an entirely new field of interdisciplinary studies led by digital artists.