How VJs See Their Work


A Look at VJing with a VJ's Eye

If you look at VJing with a VJ's eye you will see it's not only all kind of backstage stuff that's his primary concern. His feelings about what he is doing during the process of new multimedia context creation may vary and are not easy to be put into a few simple words. Perhaps if you can catch a VJ upon his return from gigs and ask him what is VJing he will immediately say it's a way of experimenting with visuals similar to how a DJ combines sound tracks. It's certainly true and there's a quick analogy to the work of a DJ, but a VJ's art is a manifold compound and cannot be equated to a couple of mixing skills.

A VJ is not just an artist who performs live; he is his own film director and story teller, his own script writer and producer. Like an architect building luxury apartments, a VJ collects and resamples visuals into an entirely new striking composition. By making the most of his creative mind and the ideas that are vibrating from the audience, he transforms many little things into a big and unique performance and transmits his innovation all over the place.

VJing is exclusively a live art form and as a live artist a VJ works with his visual tools in real time, composing new motion films that are never exactly repeated again. He enjoys himself and his audience with all sort of flippant imagery, flashes of light and color, sound blasts, and visual tricks which may lack original meaning but will get some in the process. A live play by a VJ can hardly be compared to what a recorded project can offer. While performing live a VJ provokes exciting sensations that will feel vivid a good while after you leave the venue. One of the main reasons for that is the audience's active contribution to what is happening on the large stage screen. VJs are always willing receivers of incoming media sources and encourage a spontaneous response from the crowd. Modern mobile services like SMS messaging enable the VJ to get and insert short pieces of text into the scenes being composed and the people down the stage can feel involved in the process and find another way to entertain themselves.

A variety of channels to get input from is a technology-related issue, and VJs actively use technology to make the most of their live shows and cope with the challenge of real time media content creation that tends to become still more sophisticated. Yet it would be wrong to think of a VJ as an all-round technician. Assume you manage to create an abstract vision by finding relevant data and switching between your PC applications - will that help you explain the current activities of the central processing unit? Certainly, a VJ requires good computer skills and today more VJs also work online to give real time shows to Internet users. Certainly, a VJ must work hard for a successful performance and may become a muso overconcerned with techniques but VJing is always fun and should remain, look and feel so for every participant of the show. Live and prepared media both have their own viewers but vary radically, and each one is free to make a choice of which appeals most to their hearts.