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 AV SOCIAL TATE LIVERPOOL - Screening Call Out Ne1co is calling for screening
works at the next AV Social held at Tate Liverpool on 27 November 2008. This edition of
The AV Social will act as the closing ceremonies of the Liverpool Biennial 2008, the
UK’s largest festival of contemporary art. To Enter [top] The AV Social returns with another magnetic program of audiovisual works for its next event scheduled at the British Film Institute. This again is a special one because The AV Social will be included in the BFI's long weekend of celebration for it's 75th anniversary. Our lineup for this edition will feature DVJ extraordinaire Dan Tait, playing for us a newly updated version of visual IDM, initially shown at Sonar 2008. MTV + OneDotZero award winner Quayola also headlines with his latest edition of Path to Abstraction a multi-screen sound and vision piece, delivered from a single laptop. Likewise, Oli Sorenson will launch his latest DVD album Subject Zero, with an extended live remix of this work. But look out, do make sure to come early and catch the unsigned talents of 8bit artists Steve and Pikilipita, warming up with an AV set performed exclusively from games consoles. The AV Social, a social networking opportunity for London’s audiovisual community. The AV Social – 26 September, 9pm-2am British Film
Institute Dan Tait (Leeds, UK)
September's edition of The Av Social would like give warm thanks to Pioneer Pro DJ for suppying Plasmas screens, DVJs and a SVM100 mixer. [top] This edition was the most exciting event yet, as the AV Social presents a ‘Late at Tate’ event at the Tate Britain art gallery. Collaborating with such a historic British art institution is a rare and interesting event, and we are excited to swap a night club for galleries full of Neoclassical sculpture and Romantic paintings. What strange hybrids will be made when slides and video light up the space. Setting up camp amongst the dramatic backdrop of neo-classical sculptures and renaissance paintings at the 4,000 capacity Tate Britain you'll find installations, performances and screenings from some of the world's finest VJs and audiovisual artists. As an ambient soundtrack washes throughout the building you're invited to come and explore both the Tate exhibits and modern works AV Social @ Late at
Tate Britain Hiraki Sawa
(Kanazawa, JP)
Most AV artists wouldn’t count chop sticks, pot plants and sieves amongst their most important tech gear. But Rod MacLachlan and Jem Noble are not mainstream club performers. They are two thirds of respected arts collective Blackout Arts, based in Bristol who have been responsible for many impressive events and installations, such as large-scale projections on a tower block. After studying fine art foundation at the nearby Chelsea art college in London, Rod moved to Glasgow to study sculpture, where he fell into the visuals scene, making DIY projections and decor for parties in the mid-nineties. Rod’s sensitivity to the environment in which the installation is to be performed is clear. His work shares a gallery with the Three Graces statue, and he very much wanted to create a piece that responded to the atmosphere and architecture of the gallery. The installation forms a triptych of video projections which surround the sculpture; the monochrome shadow-play complementing the theatrically lit white marbles in the Hall. The first panel of the triptych is simple projected silhouettes of rotating chop sticks. The second is formed by the texture and movement of rotating plant foliage mixed with radient shards from a slow shutter camera capturing the fall of sawdust through a lightbeam. The third image is from a drifting Mobile made of paper cut outs of Classical figures, a Stag and an Eagle. Audio is also generated as the objects move with contact mics and light-sensitive theremins producing rhythms and drones. These are re-worked into an audio tapestry by Jem Noble. This installation is striking and innovative in its rejection of tools considered standard for VJs and AV performers, and the high-tech culture of using only the newest tools. The work takes VJing back to the hands-on ‘DIY’ culture from which it so proudly springs, and also returns the performance to a ‘live’-ness and immediacy that has so often been used to characterize VJing. Rod is using only a series of vision mixers to mix the feeds, favouring the physical theatre of objects over the ‘black box’ of computer image processing, and perceptions of a smooth computer world, generated by CGI. But the work is also so much more than this, using everyday objects, dust and light to create landscapes that demand interpretation, that allow us to dream. While this work might sound strange and obscure, it promises to be truly extra-ordinary, and may yet prove to steal the show.
My journey to interview Bopa doesn’t start well. Rain is pelting the bus roof on the way to her studio in Dalston, and I’m late. But Bopa pulls me in the studio door as soon as I arrive for a warm welcome. “I’m a bit nervous” she says. “I don’t know what to say in interviews!” Her key collaborator Dirk Rauscher from Bruno Tait is on Skype for moral support. When we reach her computer, she’s already working in Adobe Illustrator on curling architectural designs for the slides that will be projected next week. She need not have been nervous, as the slide designs look beautiful. She explains to me how site specific this Late at Tate event will be. “In our section of the gallery, we’re not allowed to project onto the sculptures,” she says “so we literally had to work around them.” In this case, the empty space behind the sculptures becomes the focus for the installation - it forms a visual bridge between the Neoclassical sculptures and the arched architecture of the Victorian gallery building.Bopa and Bruno Tait have created a set of slides that use graphic elements to create building facades and architectural features, reminiscent of blueprints (as in the title of the piece). These architectural blueprints of light feature traditional shapes and lines from Roman architecture, alongside the modern graphic design more familiar from their VJ work. As with a real blueprint, their architecture sits between imagination and reality. The architectural slide projections will run down from the ceiling to wrap right around the statues without touching them, building an new environment around them.”For me it’s a kind of homage to Romanesque architecture,” Dirk elaborates, “it’s a challenge to integrate the elements of the environment, the room, statues, lights, projection.” “The slides don’t really tell a story, but try to impress the audience in a sensitive way, as Roman architecture in the past often did.” Indeed, Bruno Tait have created installations like this before, in old churches.But the slides are just one aspect of the installation, as in this case the team will also be incorporating video into this huge installation, with the help of the VMS video moving system.The versatility of the VMS system allows Kjell Rijntijes, from Bruno Tait to project a masked-off video clip seamlessly into one shape on the blueprint slide. This integration of video brings movement to this immersive environment, and with it brings a tension between the stillness of the statues and the new moving architectures. As the theme of the event is ‘ambient’ the movement will be sensitive and choreographed, Bopa tells me. If the intention is to impress, they have succeeded already, as I see a really beautiful and thoughtful response emerge from a set of difficult technical constraints and ambitions. I can’t wait to experience it for myself.
Presenting a new audio-visual DVJ set in room 9 will be Oli Sorenson, once widely known under the ‘VJ Anyone’ moniker. As the name suggests, his identity as VJ Anyone has been an important aspect of his work. The transition to Oli Sorenson has also been marked by a change in the style and direction of his image creation. As VJ Anyone, visuals were upbeat, and ‘political’ sampled visuals were dismissed as a distraction from the serious need for a hedonistic space in which to experiment and create. As Oli Sorenson, work turns towards a darker and more potent raw minimalism. Previous remixes of THX1138, Ghost Hack (from Ghost in the Shell) and the recent Subject 0, see Sorenson exploring figures such as the ‘cyborg’, and the ‘hacker’. At first glance these themes seem dated, as the 1990s cyberpunk-isms have given way to the mainstream internets of Facebook and mySpace. But a second glance is more revealing. Sorenson jokes that another title for this piece could have been ‘Retro-Futuristic Nostalgia for the Neo-Future’ which touches a nerve with me. The future worlds of the science fiction classics that I love are mostly past. Sorenson asks me - what happens now when people are watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2008? To answer this question Sorenson’s CyberNoir takes an earnest look at cyber culture, a celebration rather than a critique of those figures in popular culture he aligns with the VJ, such as the hacker or cyborg. The performance is also a knowing nod to his presumed audience of VJ geeks. This work will be an interesting companion to the Romantic paintings of Turner, Wood and Lawrence that share room 9. The geometric minimalism of Sorenson’s work could suggest the order and rational universality of the computer. But like the Romantics and the hacker, I think it is the imaginative experiences of spontaneity and freedom from rules that Sorenson’s work seeks to provide.
Embolex, Marginala2
(2007), Dur: 5.06 words:Lara Houston [top]
Ne1Co Presents: THE AV SOCIAL Featuring: AddictiveTV, EmptySet / VJ Anyone, Quayola, MeekTV / Lazerboy. Thursday, 11 October 2007, 8PM-2AM, Clerkenwell House, 23 ; 27 Hatton Wall, Clerkenwell, London, EC1N 8JJ. NEAREST TUBE: Farringdon or Chancery Lane. After a busy summer festival season, VJ Anyone’s collective of audiovisual creatives re-group under Ne1co to promote another edition of the AV Social. Once more hosted at Clerkenwell House, the AV Social yet again inspires to be one of the most recognized audiovisual events in London, with an incredible lineup of musical and visual artists, in an intimate and socially conducive environment. Addictive TV will
headline October’s AV Social with a rare London appearance, outside their annual
gigantic stints at Optronica and the National Theatre. The renowned DVD turntablists have
taken time off their busy touring schedule - between the Pompidou Centre in Paris,
Brazil’s SkolBeats festival to clubs in Russia, Japan, Kuwait, Europe and more ; to
present their latest Hollywood and MTV video mashups. No wonder they’ve been twice
voted Number 1 VJs in the world by DJ Mag ! www.addictive.com [top] |
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