Feedback loop projected on double glass doors from outside, at Bar Reis, in Park Slope, in the spring of 2004Figure 1: Feedback loop projected on double glass doors from outside, at Bar Reis, in Park Slope, in the spring of 2004.

Feedback loop feed Feedback loop feed (Note human shadow) Feedback loop feedFigure 2: Stills from a live video performance at the RIVAA gallery, on Roosveldt Island, in the spring of 2002.

Live Video Performances

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.