Alexander Bohn

VJing is still a young art — it’s only been practiced in its current form for about five years, versus turntablism, which has been around since 1977. As such, the lack of convention in VJ practice is a double-edged sword. Newer software allows anyone with a laptop to queue up a bunch of low-grade video clips, right from the dregs of their hard drive, and sync them with a beat. That’s not to suggest that one needs to write their software from scratch to do a good job; there are plenty of VJs who tweak and twaddle their Jitter patches to within an inch of their life (as it were), never noticing the supreme lack of entertainment written all over the collective faces of their audience.

One large problem with having video as a component of a music performance is manner in which it acts as a totalizing visual focal point. This is a function of the medium: CRT tubes and LCD projectors were designed to be stared at. My live video work is composed of nonrepresentational elements: fields of color built up by moving planar shapes across one another, analog video feedback created in the performance space, and the natural lighting and shade that one finds in the performance spaces themselves.

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Six-minute single-channel algorithmically composed SD video, composed of still footage shot in urban ruins primarily in and around Melbourne, Australia.

Over 1500 photographs were taken, during 5 or so entirely guerilla operations, at several locations over the course of a few weeks. This pool was edited down to about 300 shots, which can be perused by the intrepidly curious in this Flickr set. These were then sequenced and animated, using a Java2D-based rendering engine. The resultant ~10min of footage was moved into Final Cut Pro and edited traditionally. Titles, and a handful of heavily illustrative segments, were composited in After Effects.

The soundtrack to Work/Bathroom is an original piece by Jesse Stiles. Many of the soundtracks’ percussive and textural elements were distilled from sounds captured in field recordings of the photo shoots themselves.

Work/Bathroom was most recently screened at the Synaesthesiologists New York Video Festival, in the Spring of 2004.

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