The History of VJ

by Michael Heap

1965:- San Fransisco: Kesey Bus
First of Ken Kesey & the Prankster’s Acid tests, Described as an un-scripted Spontaneous Multimedia happening
Grateful Dead House Band, Be In style freeform party with projections from Kesey & Pranksters exploitation’s on their Bus ‘further’

1966:- New York: Andy Warhol & Exploding plastic inevitable.
Focus around the development of several Club nights in New York, the first ‘Andy wharhol uptight’
"If you had been in New York City in February 1966, you might have been one of a thousand people who received a flyer in the mail advertising 'Andy Warhol Up-Tight' at the Film-Makers Cinematheque on West 41st Street... a combination of films by Andy Warhol, lights by Danny Williams, music by The Velvet Underground and Nico, dancing by Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick, slides and film projections by Paul Morrissey and Warhol, photographs by Billy Linich and by Nat Finkelstein... movie cameras by Barbara Rubin... Donald Lyons and Bob Neuwirth (Dylan's roadie and confidant), listed in the ad, came as Edie's escorts...
The show began with a film called 'Lupe' starring Edie Sedgwick... After two 35 minute reels of 'Lupe', The Velvet Underground and Nico walked onto the stage in front of the movie screen and began to tune up in the dark. Andy, who was working one movie projector, now trained a silent version of 'Vinyl', his interpretation of 'A Clockwork Orange' starring Gerard Malanga as a juvenile delinquent, on the screen. Superimposed on this by another movie projector run by Paul Morrissey were close-up shots of Nico singing 'I'll Keep It With Mine' by Bob Dylan... Then as The Velvet Underground went into 'Venus In Furs', Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick moved to centre stage and began gyrating in a free form dance pattern. The whole ensemble was now playing in front of two movies 'Vinyl' and 'The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound' being shown silently next to each other...Lou began to sing 'Heroin'. Gerard slowly unwound, came to rest on the floor of the stage, and proceeded to light a candle and, in a kneeling position, slightly bent over, undid his belt. He pulled a spoon from his back pocket, rolled up his sleeve, heated the spoon over the flame of the candle, touched the spoon with what appeared to be a hypodermic needle (actually a lead pencil), wrapped the belt around his arm tightly, and began to flex his arm in a sweeping up-and-down motion. Then he pressed the 'needle' into his arm, slowly rose and began to whirl frantically around the stage."
Warhol and Paul Morrissey had originally intended to have The Velvets play at a nightclub that Broadway producer Michael Myerberg was opening. Myerberg had met with Warhol and Morrissey at Sardis and offered to pay Warhol to hang out there with people like Edie Sedgwick to generate publicity for the club. According to an account by Paul Morrissey, it was Morrissey who suggested that rather than just getting paid to sit there, they should present a group that Warhol managed a la Brian Epstein. Myerberg agreed, but Warhol did not yet have a band to present. It was then that they started looking for a band and 'discovered' the Velvet Underground when Gerard Malanga took Warhol and Morrissey to see them at the Cafe Bizarre in December 1965. Warhol suggested calling Myerberg's club, 'Andy Warhol's Up'.
However, as time passed, other people became involved with the disco and Myerberg's influence over the project decreased. His interest had also waned after seeing the 'Andy Warhol, Up-Tight' show at the Cinematheque during the second week of February. Eventually, about a week before they were supposed to open, Morrissey was informed that the people behind the club had decided to open it with The Young Rascals instead of The Velvet Underground.
After Morrissey found out about the club's decision, he went down to the Cafe Figaro in Greenwich Village where Warhol had gone with Gerard Malanga It was while he was telling Andy what happened that their conversation was overheard by Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern who were sitting at the table behind them and told them about the Dom:
The Dom had been a Polish dance hall called Stanley’s the Dom (Polsky Dom Narodny - the word "Dom" being Polish for home). The two people who had rented it from the owners did "sculpture with light" but were not ready to use the space until May. So Andy rented it during April to present the Plastic Inevitable. Entry was $6 and it was a success, making $18,000 in the first week.
Sterling Morrison: "But our actual salary from Paul Morrissey, who handled the business side for Andy, was five dollars a day, for cheese or beer at the Blarney Stone. He had a ledger that listed everything, including drug purchases - $5 for heroin. When the accountant saw it, he said 'What the hell is this?':"
According to Gerard Malanga and Victor Bockris, all the people contributing to the show were paid the same amount - Lou Reed got the same for playing as Gerard did for dancing or Danny Williams for doing the lights: "On an average night at the Dom they would be paid a hundred dollars apiece".
During the first week that the Dom was open, it took in $18,000.00.
While performing at the Dom, Lou Reed's Gretch guitar and record collection was stolen.
DANNY WILLIAMS who did the lights/sound for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable would later mysteriously disappear in 1967 "off the coast of Cape Cod leaving his clothes by the side of his car." Although his body was never found, it is presumed to be a suicide.
Sterling Morrison: "It was at this time that The Velvets started wearing dark glasses on stage, not through trying to be cool but because the light-show could be blinding at times."
At the same time that the VELVETS were playing at the Dom, Andy’s film, MY HUSTLER was playing uptown at the Film-Makers’ Co-op and Warhol's silver helium-filled pillows and yellow and pink cow wallpaper was being shown at the Castelli Gallery.
The final performance of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom took place on April 30, 1966.
It then went on tour Across the US.

1969: Nam June Piak & Vietnam & PortaPak <no video>
Paik is famed for having said "Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back".
Paik’s statement should not be interpreted only on one level: he was not proposing that video art would destroy, replace or simply be an alternative to television. As became apparent with later projects such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell in 1984, Paik and many other artists were also deeply interested in occupying the broadcast space of television as an expanded arena for art.
Nam June Paik appears again in this history of appropriation, as purportedly the first artist to acquire and use a video portapak as a tool of artistic expression. The portapak was developed by Sony as a lightweight portable recording device for use in air-to-ground surveillance during the Vietnam war. It was only as the war drew to a close that the electronics industry realised that they had a product to sell on the open market. Since the launch of that crude, low resolution black and white recording system as the world’s first home video format in 1969, the video camera has become one of the most widespread consumer tools since Kodak launched the amateur camera.
The history of video art, particularly from the early seventies until the mid nineties, is also the history of workshops, co-operatives, pressure groups and activist organisations whose aim was to provide access to the means of electronic communication and to propose an alternative to the dominant forms of communication and culture practised by broadcasting corporations and mainstream art institutions. During this period in North America and most European countries, artists, media activists and community-based political groups organised themselves around idealistic, collectively run and usually open-access workshops or labs where the expensive tools of media production could be made available at reasonable prices to individuals and groups lacking the budgets required for commercial production. The legacy of this "movement" can still be seen today in the many medialabs that have now very often shifted their focus to the internet and digital communications.

1970’s Video art progression, Stadium Rock & birth of spectacle
Late 70’s Birth of hip-hop

1983 Herbie Hancock :- Rokit/Rockit video - Godley & Crème
< VIDEO :ROCKIT>
Question: What do a critic's poll-topping band from the 1970's, the video for "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, a guitar attachment called The Gizmo, a Nissan Hardbody truck commercial, an illustrated memoir titled "The Fun Starts Here," a new video label and an upcoming feature film called "Howling At The Moon" have in common?
Godley and Crème: originally part of 10cc This is the British duo that brought to the screen such delights as Duran Duran's "Girls on Film"; "Every Breath You Take" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" for The Police; "Rockit" and "Autodrive" for Herbie Hancock; "Victims" for Boy George and Culture Club; "Two Tribes" and "The Power of Love" for Frankie Goes to Hollywood; and "Don't Give Up" for Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.
But music video is but the most recent medium they've mastered. As half of the British pop quartet 10cc, they had a six-year string of hits, and they're about to release their seventh LP as a duo, Goodbye Blue Sky, their first since The History Mix, Vol. 1, in 1985. In the meantime, they've written and/or illustrated a variety of books; created and produced television advertising (Wrangler Jeans, Lincoln-Mercury, New York and Boston Yellow Pages); invented, manufactured and marketed guitar electronics (the Gizmo); as well as directed an eye-opening array of creative endeavours which never quite made it to market .
Their first single off 10cc, "Donna" - a clever doo-wop parody - reached number two in the U.K., and the second, "Rubber Bullets," hit number one in July '73. "The Dean and I," the debut's third single, also went top ten. In America, Cashbox magazine voted them "The Best New Group of 1973."
Although on their first video, it was one of the first commercially released showing scratch video techniques. Its possibly the weirdest music video ever released.

1985: May: Paul Hardcastle 19 <Video: 19>
Paul Hardcastle
Paul's first major release was on Chrysalis and he decided to try a different approach. Staying true to the dance floor genre that had got him this far, he perfected a dramatic, arresting semi-instrumental composition based on something he'd heard about the average age of combat soldiers in the Vietnam War. The production values of the resulting track have given "19" a place in the all-time dance music winners enclosure.
By the time the single became commercially available at the end of April 1985, the buzz about "19" was deafening. The song crash-landed on the British chart at #4. The next week saw "19" at the #1 spot, where it stayed for a solid five weeks. In Holland it stayed put at the #1 spot nationally for 16 weeks solid, proving not only Paul's staying power, but also his international appeal.
"It sold 4 million copies around the world," Paul recalls. "I remember it sold 65,000 copies here in the UK on the day it went to number one. It was great, because it went to #1 in 13 different countries and it's one of the records I still hear on the radio and I feel proud. I feel proud because I received the IVOR NOVELLO award for the best selling single of 1985."

1985: June The motorcade sped on: Steinski <VIDEO>
Also around the same period, journalist ‘Steinski’ (of the highly influential "Double Dee and Steinski") created the song The Motorcade Sped On which was a cut-up collage of the live news reports surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Aside from the brilliant use samples, what is truly revolutionary about this song is that it was composed as an audiovisual piece using TV footage as A/V samples. The actual news footage – both audio and video – of Kennedy’s murder was cut-up and re-edited into a piece in which, once you’ve seen and understood the piece, the audio cannot be separated from the video

1985: Late Duvet bros. & scratch Video <VIDEO>
The independent media movement had a major international impact on the growth of video and subsequent forms of electronic art. At the aesthetic level, the most profound tendency to emerge from this field was represented by Scratch Video, a form with close links to sampling in music and with its historical roots in political photomontage and avant garde film. As a form, scratch had a wide appeal, and was taken up variously by visual artists, political activists, music video producers, advertisers and film directors. Paik again is to be mentioned in this context – the constant re-use and re-cutting of both original and found imagery in rapid-fire electronic montages of sound and image is characteristic for his work. Drawing on the history of avant garde film – particularly the abstract film language of artists such as Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, or the cut-up films of Bruce Connor, Paik elaborates a visual language of video that links him to Warhol in terms of both his impact on contemporary art and his attitude to the use of imagery from mass media. A key point in the development of scratch or appropriated video is in the late 1970’s when American artist Dara Birnbaum made her series of short works Pop Pop Video, the most memorable of these being Technological Transformation: Wonder Woman. This brief – and for the time – rapidly edited montage of images from the popular tv series Wonder Woman welded the irreverent aesthetics of punk to a formal avant garde tradition and the so called "drastic classicism" of New York’s post-minimalist new music milieu, typified by the noise barrage of composers like Rhys Chatham and Glen Branca. Birnbaum worked directly with musicians from that milieu, along with other emerging video artists like John Sanborn, Kit Fitzgerald and Mary Perillo, who had close ties with The Kitchen Centre for Video, Dance and New Music.

Thus in the early eighties Scratch Video quickly became a widespread form that broke with earlier, durational, performative and minimalistic forms of video art. In London at the Brixton night club The Fridge, a group of young artists including George Barber, The Duvet Brothers, Sandra Goldbacher and Kim Flitcroft arranged weekly screenings, showing their re-cut versions of tv commercials and hollywood films on a heap of old tv sets bound together with heavy steel chains. The images would often be accompanied by music that existed at the point of transition between post-punk new wave, American hip hop, techno and Jamaican dub. At the same time in New York clubs like Manmhattan’s Danceteria were home to a milieu of young video artists who wanted to develop and expose their work in a social context outside of the mainstream gallery world. As a style, Scratch spread rapidly across Europe, North America and in Japan, and in many of these places it acquired a sharp political edge when it became a tool in the hands of media activists who instinctively understood that its deconstructive techniques could be applied to political campaigning. In Britain, groups like Gorilla Tapes and The Duvet Brothers achieved wide exposure, including extensive tv broadcasting. The visual language they used quickly passed over into the vocabulary of television, particularly in the case of youth programming, music video and advertising. Other artists including George Barber, the German Ingo Günther, and former experimental film makers such as David Larcher, contributed to the development of a complex language of electronic images which directly impacted upon the emerging disciplines of communication design and video graphics. At a point in the mid eighties, London was the undisputed world centre for video graphics, and many video artists found themselves working in high technology studios for high budget clients. In the USA, the heritage of Scratch as a political tool for activism and cultural terrorism was reconfigured in the late eighties and nineties by artists such as Paul Garrin, a former assistant of Nam June Paik, and the group Emergency Broadcast Network who developed an early form of "culture jamming". Subsequently, groups like Negativland, The Barbie Liberation Front, RtMark and numerous others have taken the project further both in electronic media and real-world actions or interventions.
late 1980’s:

Max Headroom <MAXHEADROOM>
The time is "20 minutes into the future" and all over the city TV screens are going blank.
Since this city is both entirely dependent upon and totally dominated by television, panic sets in: people are even raiding each other's homes for old video recordings. Enter Edison Carter, ace investigative reporter for Network 23. Carter quickly discovers who is sabotaging the TV transmissions. It's the "Blanks," a band of terroristic urban outcasts who have used their computer skills to wipe themselves off all official records. Now the Blanks are trying to pull the city's plug. Whom to turn to? Why, Max Headroom, of course, Carter's computer-generated alter ego. To penetrate the Blank's headquarters, Max is transformed into a "self-contained ROM construct with an isometric optical microlink."... At last the TV image of Max confronts the leader of the Blanks in his electronic lair. But before they can cross disc drives, Max can't resist doing his Bogart. "Of all the computers in all the systems in all the world," he sighs, "I had to walk into yours."
The series also calls to mind some of MTV's farthest-out videos like Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," with its free-floating animations, and Prince's "Raspberry Beret," in which the singer seems to have been sliced and diced by a berserk computer. Yet, in effect, "Max Headroom" has carried the MTV revolution into another dimension. Indeed, a rock-video freak dialing from "Max" to MTV might conclude that the latter suddenly appears downright stodgy.
Perhaps that's because this series has fused its avant-garde pyrotechnics onto a genuine, and sustained, story line, then enriched the blend with whiz-bang pacing and slyly understated acting. The early ratings were mixed: millions of "Headroom" cultists gave the show respectable numbers for a highly experimental new series, yet it was equally clear that millions more literally tuned out with a kind of what-the-heck-is-this reaction. Still, even if the show fails to survive, bits and pieces of its ingenuity are virtually certain to filter into the rest of prime time.
Self-exposure: Yet "Max" may end up changing more than just how network television looks to viewers. This thoroughly subversive video parody could revise how network TV looks upon itself. "The deliciousness of the show," muses executive producer Peter Wagg, "is that a network is allowing us to show how the system works, how ratings are important, why Americans are given the same old material."
It seems no accident that this breakthrough comedy team is almost exclusively British. "American TV largely turns out predigested bunk, says "Max" writer Steve Roberts. "That's a guarantee of failure. But if someone twinkles TV's knobs, people will queue up to watch. 'Max' is challenging because it looks at the world in unorthodox ways. Europeans poke fun at their institutions as second nature, but that's not a habit here. You respect authority in a real way. You criticise and doubt it, but you don't mock it like Dickens and Monty Python."
Begin playback in London, 1982: Peter Wagg, then a 33-year-old record-company executive, is putting together an MTV-style music-video series for Britian's trendy Channel 4. Since he hopes to market the show abroad, Wagg hits upon the notion of hosting it with a computerized creature who would appeal to techno-freaks of all nations. Wagg turns to George Stone, an advertising copywriter, and Rocky Morton and Annabelle Jankel, a pair of ingenious computer-graphic animators. Together the three hatch Max.
To play their creation's human template (Max is actually a flesh-and-blood actor whose image has been manipulated by electronic trickery), Wagg settles on Canada's Matt Frewer, who, with his blandly handsome visage and mid-Atlantic accent, seems ideally exportable. Frewer decides to model Max's personality after the smarmy, self-important goofiness of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show's" Ted Baxter. "I particularly wanted to get that phony bonhomie of Baxter," recalls the actor. "Max always assumes a decadelong friendship on the first meeting. At first sight he'll ask about that blackhead on your nose."
Wagg has forbidden Frewer to discuss precisely how he's transformed into Headroom for fear of diminishing Max's mystique. ("If we tell you how to do it from A to Z," says the actor, "anybody could make Max. Add one egg, oregano, and you have Headroom Alfonso.") Despite such understandable reticence, this much can be disclosed. During a two-hour makeup session, Frewer dons a latex mask, shocking-blue contact lenses, a yellow, rubberized wig and a fibre-glass suit. His image is then processed through a kind of computer-graphic Cuisinart that electronically alters his features. Max's jerky vocal inflections are the product of a voice synthesizer.
The series' first episode opens with Max introducing a weird German video with an equally-weird, fractured-German sentence. "Everybody was scared stiff, " recalls Wagg of the premiere. But within a month more than a million viewers are turning in, nearly doubling Channel 4's ratings for the time slot. To maximize his star's appeal, Wagg begins cutting back on the music and bringing on such celebrity guests as Boy George, Simon LeBon and Jack Lemmon. By the eighth episode, Max has made his first public appearance--opening a furniture store in Belfast. From then on, says Wagg, "he was unstoppable."
Fast-forward to the States: The Cinemax pay-cable service, which has helped finance Max's launch in Britian, unleashes his series on the American audience. By now Max's ego--inflated, no doubt, by his worshipful press reviews--is roughly the size of a satellite dish, while his attention span has shrunk to microsecond dimensions. In short, he's become the perfect talk-show host. His run on Cinemax is rife with indelicate moments: Max introducing hair stylist Vidal Sassoon as "V.D. Sassoon"; Max listening to Sting go on about his "art" and suddenly breaking into an exaggerated yawn; Max greeting Michael Caine by saying, "OK, Michael, fire away ... What have you always wanted to ask me?" The show instantly enraptures young viewers. Max, after all, speaks their language: computer literate, media-wise and gleefully disrespectful. In shopping malls and homerooms, the coolest kids suddenly discover a new way to convulse each other. They begn t-t-talking like th-th-this.
Insert new cassette, courtesy of Coke: The ever-ambitious Wagg realizes that he still needs something to give the "Maxhead" cult a mass spin. The Coca-Cola Co., meanwhile, is looking for a way to get the message about its New Coke to the teenagers they created it for. It's a marriage made in promotional heaven, the first real occasion in which a commercial spokesperson for a major corporation becomes a national celebrity as a result of his commercial performances.
Max's "C-C-Catch the wave" spots for Coke, two of which were directed by Ridley Scott, may be the most cleverly constructed pitches ever aimed at the under-30 viewer.

EBN <LSD>
Emergency Broadcast Network
Emergency Broadcast Network (E.B.N.) was born, creating an art form borne from the convergence of media and music. These were the heady days of the Persian Gulf War, and E.B.N.’s core team – Joshua L. Pearson, Gardner H. Post, Ronald O'Donnell, and consultant Brian Kane – seized the opportunity to reinterpret the media frenzy of the war, creating counter-psy-ops programming in the guise of music videos.
Owing as much to the experimental art of Duchamp and Dadaism as to new advances in technology, the results paved the way for the underground media revolution, with E.B.N. as its forefathers. The group solidified its team with the addition of famed software designer and musician Greg Deocampo (creator of AfterEffects), and set about perfecting its approach to reprocessing media noise.
E.B.N.’s visibility skyrocketed when Irish rockers U2 asked to use the cut "We Will Rock You" to open its Zoo TV tour. Soon after, TVT Records signed the group and released the VHS tape "Commercial Entertainment Product" in 1992, and the enhanced CD "Telecommunication Breakdown" in 1995.
Unable to generate the significant income required for R&D, software and hardware, E.B.N. closed shop in 1998. But, in an act that ensured its legacy as pioneers in underground media, Joshua Pearson created a series of E.B.N.-style videos on the 2000 Presidential Election called OTV News.
Raves & E culture ‡ rise of the superstar DjYou're probably familiar with the story of how a bunch of holidaymking DJs discovered the synergy between house and Ecstasy in the clubs of Ibiza; how they brought the anything-goes "Balearic" vibe back to cool-crippled London in late 1987; how by the summer of '88, the trippy, futuristic sound of Chicago acid house had spawned the most demonized British subculture since punk, which then spilled out into the English countryside in '89 as inner city warehouse parties evolvd into massive raves in fields near the M25. It's a tale that, if not exactly sting-less, is certainly thrice told. But there's a case for saying that musical revolutions actually have their biggest impact a few years after their over-mythologized, "official" origins, when the ideas have filtered from the metropolitan hip cliques through to suburbia.
Just as punk continued to prosper and mutate in the provinces for years after Sid Vicious's death, similarly rave really became a mass bohemia during the three year period 1990-92. A huge circuit of legal, commercial raves developed, while the liberalisation of licensing hours allowed for rave-style clubs with all-night dancing. It was also in 1990 that home-grown British house music really took off, breaking the dependence on Black American imports from Chicago, Detroit and New York. As sampling and sequencing technology got cheaper, hordes of teenage DJ/producers made tracks dirt-cheap on simple computer set-ups in their bedrooms, then sold these "white label" 12-inches direct to specialist record stores. Propelled by the demographic heft of the rave nation, these "hardcore" rave tunes bombarded the pop charts throughout 1991-92, despite next to no airplay. Hardcore was also the birth of a uniquely British rave sound--a mutant hybrid of hip hop breakbeats, seismic reggae bass, stabbing riffs and mindwarping samples. At the pop end of the hardcore spectrum, groups like The Prodigy, Altern-8, N-Joi, and SL2 invaded the Top Five. At the more underground end, hardcore was the staple of the pirate radio stations that infested the FM airwaves, and the ruling sound at illegal raves, which resurged massively in 1991 through the efforts of crusty-traveller outfits like Spiral Tribe.
As an anarchic cultural force, rave culture peaked in the summer of 1992, when the biggest commercial raves peaked at 25 to 35 thousand, and the techno traveller festival at Castlemorton Common in the West Country drew an estimated forty thousand revellers during its six days of highly illegal existence. By 1993, though, rave culture was in disarray: illegal raves were systematically crushed by local police forces across the country, the commercial rave circuit was in decline owing to bad vibes and rip-off events. Hardcore had always been less utopian than the uplifting house of 1988-89,. During the early Nineties, as ravers took progressively higher doses of Ecstasy and amphetamine, the subculture's metabolic rate accelerated drastically, resulting in ever-escalating tempos and a vibe that exhiliratingly blended euphoria and aggression. The result was a teenage "rush" culture that had more in common with videogames, extreme sports and joyriding than late Sixties transcendence-through-altered-states. By 1993, hyperkinetic hardcore rave plunged into the darkside, becoming the convulsive, bad-trippy soundtrack to paranoia, panic attacks and eerie feelings of the uncanny (all symptoms of long-term Ecstasy abuse).
By the mid-Nineties, rave culture--hitherto a chaos of social and sonic mixing--was stratifying into increasingly narrowcast scenes organised around race, class, and region. Once, you could go to a rave and not know who you'd end up talking to, or what kind of music you'd be exposed to; now, it was all too easy to choose a soundtrack that guaranteed satisfaction but no surprises, and to ensure that you only mixed with "your own kind". Club culture became professionalized, with the rise of "superclubs"like Cream, Renaissance and Ministry of Sound (mini-corporations who raked in the money with merchandising, sponsorship deals, even club tours that took their legendary "vibe" around the county), and with the emergence of a Premier League of star DJs who travelled up and down the UK, earning up to two thousand pounds for a two-hour set, and often playing several gigs per night at the weekend.
All this took the edge out of E culture. As the late Gavin Hills, journalist and acid house veteran, put it: "Ecstasy culture is like a video-recorder now: an entertainment device, something you use for a certain element of pleasure. The club structure is like the pub structure: it has a role in our society." That role is arguably as a kind of safety-valve/social-control mechanism, with youth living for the temporary utopia of the loved-up weekend rather than investing their idealism in a long-term collective project of political change. It's the traditional working class "culture of consolation", with three E's replacing ten pints. And E, the magic pill, has lost both its aura of enchantment and its status as the most favoured drug of the "chemical generation"; it is now just one brain-blitzing weapon in the neurochemical arsenal. Because of this "polydrug" culture of mixing-and-matching, the atmosphere in clubs has changed: instead of the clean, clear high of MDMA and the electric connection between total strangers, the vibe is bleary and untogether. Instead of getting "loved up", people talk of getting "messy".

Reprise to scratch video
The tidal wave of "scratch video", particularly in the UK in the early 80's, provides a useful case study. Inspired by access to new tools, as well as by a strained cultural atmosphere, the early years of the Thatcher-Reagan era, young videomakers began to "scratch" the surface of broadcast television, trying to reveal those discourses which had been hidden behind the media coverage, but were, nevertheless, an essential part of the overall picture. Groups like Gorilla Tapes and Duvet Brothers grabbed the recently introduced possibility of taping TV programs with a VCR, and manipulated them in the editing studio (usually a public access video workshop). // The scratch video makers used the "repeat-edit" and other video tricks to turn Reagan's and Thatcher's media images into stuttering marionettes that acted like aliens or lunatics and said things which were the opposite of the official protocol, but close, so one suspected, to the thoughts that really crossed their minds. Scratch video was simultaneously a reaction to the ubiquitous television environment, a tactical attack against its role as the mouthpiece of conservative politics, and a new way of personal expression, of asserting one presence in the egotistic world of media. Of course, it all ended up in a failure. The main problem was access. Broadcast television ignored scratch video until it had been cleaned off its political content and turned into a new "refreshing" stylistic formula for music videos, comedy programs and hamburger commercials. After this had happened, which did not take long, scratch video makers began to receive commissions and their style was adopted (as one style among many) by TV professionals. Scratch video was co-opted by the very institution it had attempted to undermine. Scratch features also survived in video art, but neutralised and "sublimated" by museum and gallery walls.

1990: Coldcut <TIMBER>
In the mid-1990s, claiming Steinski as one of their mentors, British duo Coldcut released a set of audio-visual pieces – The Natural Rhythms Trilogy – using many of the same techniques as Steinski’s Motorcade. However, instead of using visual material with inherently linked sound, Coldcut took segments of nature videos (monkeys jumping, beetles tapping, plants opening) and created sounds in the studio to match. Having synchronized the individual video segments with the sounds, they were then edited into whole video pieces that re-contextualize our understanding of the word "natural" through the technological manipulation of these "natural rhythms". Evolution of the Vj, Visualisation software, etc.
In a 1996 piece that links the above described audio-visual works, Lucky People Center International is a masterful documentary/audiovisual cut-up groove. With an important message about the survival of the planet and humanity, Erik Pauser and Johan Söderberg combine revolutionary use of traditional talking head interviews with stunning footage of disparate musical practices and the splendour that is the Earth’s natural landscape. The film travels all over the world to hear people describe their relationship with the planet as mediated through music, descriptions that are then cut-up and re-contextualized through the music of both the film’s subjects and that created by the filmmakers themselves. The result is a tightly edited series of audiovisual songs woven together through an underlying message about living life through music. The boundaries between the image and audio information continually dissolve as spoken interviews become lyrics atop music performed thousands of miles away, and where the sounds and images of disparate cultures join in a symphony of unified existence made possible through the technologies of audio-visual fragmentation.
The unification of audio and visual information is becoming increasingly present in theoretical circles as well. Of particular note is French film theorist Michel Chion whose book Audio-Vision espouses the notion of trans-sensorial perception, an understanding that the organs we usually attribute to sense perception are only a part of how our bodies experience sensory information. Just as what we call taste is often heavily reliant on smell, so too sound is often processed on visual terms and vice-versa (as the term "stereo image" illustrates). Similarly, Canadian film theorist William C. Wees has explored the visual apparatus in his book Light Moving in Time. Here Wees draws on increasing scientific information that suggests sight is largely processed by the brain in conjunction with other areas of perception, and that the eyes actually play only the smallest of roles in our experience of vision.
In keeping with this increasing dissolution of the boundaries between audio and visual perception, and drawing on experimentation’s such as the visual soundtracks of Canadian animation master Norman McLaren and the audio-visual computer programming of John Whitney, Coldcut have since forged new territory. Becoming what they call Digital Jockeys, Coldcut have designed and made available custom software enabling their live performances to be extensions of the studio processes used to make Natural Rhythms. Together the "digital duo" manipulate audio and video samples live, as DJs would manipulate their records. Here, however, Coldcut transcend the traditional material manipulations of the DJ and move into the limitless realm of digital exploration where sound and image can truly become one.

Hexstatic <Bass Invader>
Bootleg culture
Eclectic method <Forget Jones>
Vj events