What does VJing say about our world?

If we look beyond the purely formal implications and questions raised by VJing, we can ask what does VJing say about our world and our culture. We can be certain that VJing did not emerge only because of the evolution of technology, but also because it reflects particluar changes that have happened in western culture. What are these changes?

It would take a whole thesis to talk about them, but we can try to make a short list of things that have radically changed:

1. The crisis of the narrative format: while narratives are still going strong, they exist almos exclusively in the realm of entertainment. Narrations are no longer the way in which a (western) culture makes sense of reality, basically because lies and half-truths have taken over, in an overwhelming way. Narratives have fallen almost completely under the shadow of fiction.

2. Information overload in our daily lives, and our incapability of grasping everything. Lower attention spans and fragmentation are direct and visible consequences of this.

3. Crisis of leadership and a growing questioning of authority. If the author is no longer the authority and everything has been (at least potentially) opened to questioning, can we seriously expect to have the final word on anything, even our own "inventions"?

4. The desire to break up the old, establsihed assumptions. The deeply capitalist desire of being new and original. Why make cinema when I can re-invent it? In western countries, individuals have the illusion of being self-sufficient, but also face the pressing dilemma of "coming up with something different and exciting", or being condemned to rot among the grey masses.

5. According to Vilém Flusser[1], we can imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder, which has texts for inputs and images for outputs. Our images no longer represent the world directly, but rather they represent ideas about the world. An image does not correspond directly to a thing, but to the cultural discourse that has grown from that thing. Images, then, have become a new way of writing in western cultures.

What else?

[1] Vilem Flusser "The future of writing", in "Writings (Electronic Mediations)". University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

VJing as anti-narrative

I believe that the work of a VJ can be characterized as being an anti-narrative, which can potentially generate a "meta" level of interpretation. This "meta" level becomes a narration about the VJ, and of what she is doing in the context of her own images. Let me explain:

The work of a VJ goes against all the traits of narrative. It does not constitute an alternative form of narration, nor a protonarrative, since it systematically breaks all the grammatical constituents of narrative. In fact, it essentially destroys grammar itself. According to Jerome Bruner[1], the required conditions for a narration to exist are:

1. A means for emphasizing actions performed by agents to achieve goals
2. A sequential order that must be established and maintained. Events and states should be linearized in a standard way
3. A sensitivity to what is canonical, and what violates canonicality in human interaction
4. A narrator's voice or perspective

VJ'ing escapes from all of these four conditions. In a performance, the VJ's actions become meaningless under the absence of a goal. The images on the screen appear as a sequence to the audience, thus blurring the line between linearity and non-linearity. True non-linearity is not achievable by human perception: we can not experience more than one sensory environment at a time. Yet, the performer generates sequences of images which can potentially be ordered in many different ways, so the idea of a narrative order becomes useles. This absence of a normalized development through time, along with the meaninglessness of action, have the effect of vanquishing the narrator's voice. In fact, it is quite possible for the VJ to perform without appearing in front of the public, and even without any intention to engage in active communication with the audience. Indeed, this is what most VJs do. Finally, if we understand human interaction as a form of communication and encounter, we can say that the non-communicative nature of VJing breaks, either consciously or unconsciously, the canonical relations between performer and audience.

Bruner also argues that humans have a predisposition to enter and understand the world through narrative. We tend to construct narratives in order to explain (to ourselves or to others) our experience of the world. We even use narrative to create fictions. If it is true that VJing breaks all narrative conventions (and yet it is presented in a stage and is viewed by an audience), then we could think that people will still tend to construct a narrative around it. In this case, it will almost necessarily be a narrative about the VJ act, a narrative "meta" level that emerges from anti-narrative, and possibly defeats it. A VJ show, or VJ set as it is often called, can become a story in itself, with all the elements that Kenneth Burke[2] distinguishes as appearing in any dramatic discourse:

1. The act. Q: What happend? A: "The VJ got on the stage and started to play some images, along with music."
2. The scene. Q: Where did it happen? What is the background situation? A: "In a club, in an art show..."
3. The agent. Q: Who is involved in the action? What are their roles? A: "The VJ and we, the audience. The VJ plays, and we look, listen and imagine."
4. The agency. Q: How do the agents act? By what means do they act? A: "The VJ might be trying to synchronize image with music. Maybe he is using a special interface that allows the incorporation of gestural language in her performance... how does the interface work? What software does she use?"
5. The Purpose. Q: Why do the agents act? What do they want? A: "Maybe the fragments that the VJ presents are trying to tell us something. Why does she say that? Why is the performer doing this? Well, I think that ..."

My conclusion is that the audience plays an active part in VJing, but in a level which trascends the contents that are being played. I believe that the audience constructs a story about the act of VJing, within a context provided by the content. The audiovisual objects become a mere scenario.

But, of course, the audience is always free to just feel the images and drift away...

[1] Jerome Bruner, "Acts of Meaning". Harvard University Press, 1990
[2] Kenneth Burke. See: "Burke's Pentad", http://www.rhetorica.net/burke.htm