Featured Artists - Benton-C Bainbridge
When I was 6 years old I wanted to be a monster movie maker or a mailman. By the time I was 15 I'd dropped aspirations of being a postal carrier, but was getting my hands dirty with whatever audiovisual gear I could score. My high school had a B&W 1/2" reel-to-reel deck and tube camera and an ARP Odyssey analog synth. I bought used Super-8 film cameras from the local college students and hand wired my own electronics to make noises and sequenced lights; slide machines and the first VHS decks I just borrowed from relatives. With all this junk I was making multimedia performances inspired by Laurie Anderson, The Residents and DEVO. I would load up my mom's car with gear and costumes to do shows at my high school. I'd put screens
all around classrooms or the gym and do media performance art freak-outs with my friends (including Philip R. "Bulk Foodveyor" Bonner, most recently known for his video for the new Resident's DVD of one-minute movies for The Commercial Album). We were influenced by underground comix and punk rock and experimental film and Dada Art... So, yes- we aimed to shock and perplex. Let's just say it's a miracle we were only threatened to be expelled for the kinds of shows we'd do for the teachers, our fellow students and their parents at the General McLane High School Art Fairs.
Even though I was using film cameras or doing tape-to-tape edits with VHS decks, my dream was always to make movies in realtime. As a kid I'd been exposed to realtime analog fx and synthesis as the Scanimate dominated public and commercial TV at the time, and I was given piano lessons which made film's delayed feedback loop seem very primitive. So I had a dream that I could 'play' the instruments of cinema like musical instruments.
I landed in New York City for college just as early VJs started running cult clips on stacks of TVs in Danceteria and the 'Downtown Scene' of live improvised media was picking up momentum at places like Roulette Intermedium. I soon dropped film entirely for video, making me unpopular with the film snobs at NYU, but it was obvious that electronic cinema was my path to realtime cinema. I spent hours misusing video gear to make realtime 'animations' - an oxymoronic aspiration I suppose but this meant I'd use Chyron VP1 Character Generators to make flicker videos or I'd shoot real life movements to make mesmerizing abstractions.
One day in my 'Experimental Film and Video Production' class our professor Reynold Weidenaar showed us some image processing and a/v synthesis he'd done at Experimental Television Center and I knew I had to go.
At my first ETC residency in 1989 I discovered a whole studio - and community of artists and engineers - built around the dream of the visual instrument. The four folks behind Experimental TV Center, Sherry Miller and Ralph Hocking, David Jones and Hank Rudolph, have built an institution to promote the philosophy that video artists should have their own studios with their own gear for making electronic cinema. An obvious idea now but still very radical until the mid 90s. Prior to 'prosumer' technology, video artists would rent access to video tools, typically conventional and constraining in design and billed at several hundred dollars an hour.
This was the first of many trips to Experimental Television Center where we would usually do a collaborative jam, composed on the spot through multiple takes or completely improvised. Probably our trio NNeng had the most successful live jams in the ETC studio, including "The Vertical Hi-Way" sessions where we cross-modulated dozens of oscillators to synthesize audiovisuals. After wiring together a tangle of cables the three of us would each grab a bank of knobs and tweak away to build up or destroy each others' oscillating groove.
However none of my video groups has yet acquired David Jones' video instruments. Our live shows we've done with whatever gear we could get our hands on, usually obsolete industrial gear or ever more powerful prosumer gear. Typically we would change roles from piece to piece, The Poool's three members would take turns as masters of the 'Video Stitcher' as we liked to call the Panasonic video switcher, while the other two would manipulate found objects in front of camcorders. One of the ideas of NNeng was that Nancy Meli Walker and I wanted to find ways to work around the idea of a 'gatekeeper' or master mixer so in a live performance like 'Pure Information' we were both playing cameras, props and a video mixer even though we still had to put one of the switchers at the 'downstream' end of the signal chain.
I've used literally hundreds of pieces of gear in my work- I have a reputation of buying and selling gear non-stop. I've always favored very high quality or super lo-fi equipment- I think the best results always happen when you patch two pieces of gear together that no one else thought to- like a Shintron Character Generator ($12.50 on eBay) patched into the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer (priceless- only 2 dozen were ever made). And while the Rutt/Etra is a classic video synth familiar from the work of Paik and the Vasulkas, I like to feed it with tools and techniques that from the VJ era. "Nadie 1 + 2" are silent video paintings I made by feeding Thai Video CDs through my customized MX30 while tweaking knobs live.
Personal computers were a big part of our live gigs. These were Amigas (usually with Live! Digitizers) until only about 4 years ago when I bought VIDVOX Prophet and a G3 Pismo. I still prefer to use laptops in tandem with other hardware, but in the 90's we would often fill up entire trucks, vans and station wagons with gear that took hours to patch together. For much of that decade it was a miracle just to get everything working by the time our audience walked in. In the earliest days we blew so many fuses that we'd worry if we didn't lose power at least once before showtime.
In the days of my video groups like 77 Hz, The Poool and NNeng, we were purists- we wanted to make everything in real time, using props and cameras and our custom hardware/software systems. These were video bands- we'd work with musicians but the idea was to make live abstract movies on stage so the audience could see the collaborative process that made the video, and we were very particular that our musicians and audience stayed focused on the screens.
VJ'ing and live video art is still young, but I'm excited at how the scene and awareness has been exploding in the early days of this millenium. Tech innovation is fueling this explosion- the prosumer gear and also the displays which are getting ever cheaper, more powerful... and ubiquitous. Video is becoming part of our environment, just as music became ambient in the second half of the 20th Century. This creates the need for a different kind of moving pictures- somewhere between visual music and electronic paint.
While we always had a faithful and enthusiastic following from the first days of 77 Hz, I never thought there'd be a big audience for live video art or VJ'ing. My dad used to call it my 'expensive hobby', not really understanding the crazy calligraphic patterns I made with his Heathkit oscilloscope. However it was his Model 10-30 'scope that led to my biggest gig so far, where many millions of people see my visuals, though much of that audience probably thinks a VJ is a host on MTV.
The Beastie Boys were looking for a VJ using oscilloscopes, having played with scopes scored from eBay themselves, and Jenny Schulder (video content producer) knew of me from UnityGain days. I feel like I tapped into two decades of live video performance experience but also was exposed to entirely new ways of making video live. Certainly I've never had such a great canvas to work on- Spike Brant's designs totally showcased the live video as a key element of the staging; at a minimum this was a super bright RGB LED screen wrapped around Mixmaster Mike's riser; usually there were several screens.
The official tour rig was 3 networked GrandMA lighting boards running the lights _and_ video through the Diagonal Research NEV system. This is a leading edge system bringing the lighting and video worlds together so it was both an eye opening experience and at times a steep learning curve because I was programming and running familiar video gear through a lighting person's paradigm. But the look we designed for Beastie Boys was a mix of the old and new- clip scrubbing with GRID2, rescan, CG and oscilloscopes.
I was surprised at how much improvisation was part of the gig as Beastie Boys are very much a live band. Especially the early festival gigs and TV shows were often figured out on the spot. Vidvox built a custom DV version of GRID2 for these shows so it was quick to adapt moment-to-moment. I was also able to do a two channel feed at MTV VMA LatinoAmerica by driving two laptop GRIDs from one Oxygen8.
So even now I think it helps to be equal parts artist and renegade engineer to be a VJ. Bill Etra believes that video won't become a mature art form until the tools of production become as common as pencils, or at least musical instruments. I agree and think we need more simple and intuitive tools for media manipulation, but I'll always have a fondness for that fearless and wacky mad scientist spirit that Nam June Paik gave to start the live video art movement.
some photos copyright Tim Sager
and some photos copyright jsugar