Featured Artists - Michael Parenti [ blog ]
VV: Okay, let's start with some basic background stuff.. what's your VJ name, what are your place and year of birth, how did you got started working with video and where are you now located?
MP: VJ name: exiledsurfer / UAB / Michael Parenti. Born 1963, grew up in malibu california. My first experience with filmmaking was the super 8 movies we did in the summertime as kids in our neighborhood - but the "kids" in my neighborhood were Sean and Chris Penn, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Esteves, Rob Lowe, Tatum Oneill, Christy and Jimmy Mcnichol. We were into making Wild Wild West remakes, and Vietnam war movies, using the gullies behind our houses as the set...fighting over who "died" the best.... I remember sitting in Seans room when i was about fourteen and he was sixteen...he had a poster of Jack Nicholson on one wall and Al Pacino on the other wall. He claimed one day that he would be as famous as they were...and I laughed in his face...we were just a bunch of rich surfer kids at that time, and of course he went on to work with both Nicholson and Pacino. Me, I was a punk rocker, and now i live in Istanbul, one of the most anarchistic cities on the planet...far away from the wealth and stardom that i grew up around.
My first videocamera was one of those old RCA jobs in the early eighties connected to a portable with the tuner deck in one half, and the recorder deck in the other half that you took off and hung over your shoulder. I made surf films and filmed a lot of the punk bands in the LA Punk scene in the early 80's at the whiskey a go go, the starwood, al's bar, and madame wong's west. Bands like oingoboingo, fear, blackflag, the germs, agent orange, the angry samoans, and of course, when they came to town, the Ramones. My first "real" videowork was with the Surf Punks, for the song "Shark Attack" which was one of the video's played in MTV's fledgling first year of broadcast. I also got to film a loft of legendary Jam Sessions in a local club in Malibu with people like Kris Krostofferson, Linda Rondstadt, Gary Busey, Mick Fleetwood, David Lee Roth, and Donald Fagen...It was there that I met Lee Michaels, who I collaborated with for a few years, under the name "Pay Toilet".
He had a drum machine and some midi modules in a shopping cart, and I would mix videos of Idi Amin with dada imagery with two vhs decks and a live camera of him, while playing a set of drums made out of garbage cans. But I never really took video or film seriously as a career...I was really just documenting things that were going on around me, because I was "there". I was more interested in the music. than anything else. Everyone in my neighborhood was in the "real" film business... I was really just a spectator. Then college intervened in my life, and I started wearing tweed coats and studied International Politics, graduating from Pepperdine in 1989, dreaming of becoming a music lawyer - which is what my parents wanted me to be.
VV: But you didn't become a lawyer.. you moved to Europe and in Vienna you produced over 200 music videos, worked on commercial productions for some big name companies like Gibson Guitars and Absolut Vodka.. but then in 2000 you dropped all that and started working with live visuals. Why the switch?
MP: Well, actually my video career actually really "started" three years after I moved to Vienna in 1991. I was working there as a music journalist for some really cool publications, until I got asked by the Austrian National Broadcasting company, ORF, which was still a state monopoly at the time, to produce some segments on the local music scene. There was no budget for a cameraman, so I bought one of the first Sony VX1000's in Europe and started shooting bands in the local clubs by myself again. I had huge fights with the station about broadcasting mini-dv material at the time, which they claimed was not broadcastable. I pointed out that they were only boradcasting 300 lines, and mini-dv resolution was 520 lines, so with a lot of kicking and screaming and threatening to pack up and go, they finally conceded to let me put artists like Kruder & Dorfmeister, The Sofa Surfers, Pulsinger & Tunakhan, Mum, Toxic Lounge,and Dizhan & Kamien on the air, along with a slew of other bands that were happening in Vienna at the time.
This started around 1995, and I was again right in the middle of a generational explosion of music and culture, but this time I realized it. Eventually I started producing a half hour music program for the first private tv station in Austria, Which I filmed entirely on mini-dv, and edited on a Media100 editing suite, posting the stuff in adobe after effects. Most of the bands I wanted to put on the show didn't have videos, so I started making them so I could put the bands on tv. Shoot one day in 5 locations, edit the next day for 16 hours...making it up as we went along. Sometimes I made 3 videos in one week so I had material to cut with the band interviews.
Eventually I got the notice of the major lables in Austria and started getting some reasonable budgets to work with (by local standards) and working eventually with most of the "bigest" stars in austria...which is essentia
lly a backwater in the international pop business, but well respected for its electronic music scene. The increased recognition brought me some advertising clients, so got to start doing some commercials...like you mentioned with Gibson Guitars, as well as Marshall Amplifiers, some local banks and such. But essentially I was a one man show, doing everything myself with maybe one or two other friends -- all with essentially con/prosumer equipment. It was kind of like a mission, proving to people that it could all be done with less than 10,000 dollars worth of equipment, no budget and furious mouse clicking..and the techies couldn't tell the difference. I have hundreds of hours of seminal material of a lot of phenomenal musicians and bands which I still plan on going back and editing at some point.
I sort of lost my interest however around 1998 when everyone started having
a mini dv camera and doing stuff like this, and I had worked with
just about every band of note in the country. I was basically bored.
I sort of like going where other people aren't and making things
happen, I guess I have that typical American can-do Pioneer attitude.
So I got into the then just starting local fashion scene, starting
a street and clubwear anti-label with my girlfriend at the time Katha
Harrer, called km/a (www.kmamode.com). We weren't into doing your
typical catwalk shows, preferring instead to do multimedia fashion "performances" in
clubs and other unexpected places. It was here that I started being
a VJ, so to speak. I discovered the program Videodelic, which has
great sound sensitivity, and used it at first to animate the label's
logo at our shows, mixing it with live footage. We did over 40 shows
like this ov
er a three year period all over europe, attaining a certain
cult status because it was so new at the time. The highlight was a short tour with Richard Dorfmeister dj'ing. Seeing one of the EBN perfomances really sort of clinched it for me that that was the direction I wanted to go. We did over 40 shows like this over a three year period all over europe, attaining a certain cult status because it was so new at the time.
Through the years my software toolkit expanded, first with <expose>, then later with VDMX2, Prophet and Arkaos. Since I had so much experience sitting at my editing suite, the shift sort of happened naturally, moving into a live setting. And since almost all of my filmmaking experience was with music videos, cutting to the beat or the melody or whatever came really easy to me, and I started performing in other clubs and venues just as a VJ. At that time in Vienna, there was just Pepi Ottl and Trashed Video whe were doing live stuff for clubs with loops and such, but most of the stuff in the clubs was still running on super 8,, 16mm, or multiple slide projectors. Sound Reactivity wasnt really happening yet. Having all the connections in the music business and club scene definately made it easier for me than other people, and if I wasnt getting much money it didnt matter, because there were many other corporate clients who were willing to pay for live video presentations at their official parties.
So I always sort of straddled the line between underground art and subliminal marketing for brands. I sort of figure that if there is a sponsor at a clubbing event that its better to weave the branding into the visual tapestry of the event, rather than hanging banners or handing out promo items. I personally find it less offensive, and sort of enjoy the subversion of the whole globalization train. Of course this is all mainstream advertising now, in 2005, every alchohol, tobacco, energy drink or clothing brand has their own "club" dvd that they had to promoters along with the money...So I just say thankyou and throw it into the mix along with the rest of the grabbed and original content that I work with. My attitude is if they pay the promoter so I get my fee to do live visual art in front of people, and can afford my toyz, then I can fit their logos or commercials into one of my layers that someone might or might not pay attention to while they're dancing. Chop it up, loop it, slam the fx on it till its unrecognizeable....and the sponsors always seem to go "ooooooooooohhhh...can we have a copy of that to send back to the head office?" Its sort of one of the few areas that you can get paid to mess with corporate brand identity because the companies believe that you are translating their image into a language that "opinion leaders, trendsetters, or youth" will understand and accept. They co-opt the youth, so hey, I can mash their potatoes, and smile about what I mix it with :)
VV: What sort of hardware / software tools are you using for live visuals? How do you prepare for a show?
MP: I am absolutely a die hard mac user, cant stand the sight of the Windows operating system, so although i recognize that tools like resolume and touch are powerful, I stay with what i feel comfortable with, which is primarily vidvox software. My rig varies with the number of machines I have on hand for any given gig, and I like to have as many sources as possible, but generally my core setup is two Powerbooks, and now a new 21' g5 iMac, which is really the dope.
Before the iMac, I used a DP 1.8 ghz G4 tower as my third machine, but i got tired of lugging the monitor and the tower to gigs. The iMac has it all...tons of screen real estate, and with the extended desktop patch from http://macparts.de/ibook/ which works flawlessly, its really my machine of choice. I prefer to work with the computer keyboards, and not with a midi controller...it just feels more direct to me. I have a media bank external firewire which i got from spark on my last trip to london, with two 200gig drives inside which run off the powerbooks individually, giving me dual drive access for each machine. I run a firewire cam into each machine, and then hook up two external dvd players as backup for machine crashes and to run pre'produced mixes as keying backgrounds or when I need to run and take a pee or grab a coveted bar ticket from the promoter. This jams into my favorite mixer, the Panasonic WJAV-7 which has a good 3 channel luma key, and those cheesy oldskool analog video fx to trash things up a bit. I like the whole lo-fi feel to things once the original material is manipulated by the software and the mixer and layered up real thick. Then I have these cheap chinese lcd monitors that I picked up for a hundred bucks a piece to monitor all the sources and the output.
I think I have tried just about every piece of mac VJ software out there, but I solidly run vdmx4.1 on one machine and one or the other versions of GRID2 that is current on one of the powerbooks. I keep one Powerbook running on system 9 so i can call up VDMX2 for its sturdy fontsynth or VDMX3 for the great fifo buffer, sometimes arkaos, videodelic, and Ms Pinky's maxi patch when I can convince a dj to play some tracks with their video. Recently I have started to warm up to modul8, its a stable program with a simple UI which feels a lot like my favorite flash mixer, VLIGHT and handles multiple layers really well. (But I hear that VDMX5 will be upping the ante for compositing and layering...so watch out) It really depends on the gig and the type of music though...each program has a certain look and feel to it that is relevant for one situation and totally wrong for another. Trance calls for psychedelics, hip hop for looped reality...triphop demands content, and with drum and bass you can really mash just about any look together. I do stay away from slick 3d stuff though. But when I am doing visuals for 6 or 8 hours strait, I like to switch between the programs, because I figure if I am bored with how things look, then the audience probably is too...and theres nothing worse than when you start repeating yourself at a gig.
As far as setting up for a gig is concerned, that's the beauty of it, why I love VJ'ing: I DONT prepare, other than collecting material on a regular basis. I never really know what I will do or how it will look until I am doing it -- its the music, the dj, the crowd, the venue, how many projectors there are that determine that all for me. I love the spontaneity of live visuals, the fact that you essentially cant duplicate exactly twice what you are doing if you are using sound efo's vfo's, and afo's to drive the loops and the fx. Just like a dj cant duplicate exactly his mix- the pitch, which tracks he selects when, or which fx or freq knob he twists, even though he has his favorites, those change over time. Over the years, I have built up a number of presets of material and/or fx for the different programs which i draw from, but essentially VJ'ing is the ultimate act of realtime artistic masturbation for me - candy for the brain without the side effects of drugs -- and doing it in public with a mistake here or there is part of the kick, the adrenalin which drives my inner voyeurism/exhibitionism, which I believe is the core drug of most performers. The other thing that draws me so heavily to live visual jamming is the fact that it is really one of the few places that you can, as a visual artist, get DIRECT, immediate feedback to what you are doing. Thats what bored me about making music videos in the end -- the fact that you are producing something for people that you will never see, and who might never see you. Sure, one or the other directors are famous, and known by name, and you might get an award here or there, and be able to appear in front of your peers, but essentially the only direct face to face, personal feedback that you get is usually from the band, the record label, or from some journalists. Its a pretty lonesome existence, really.
But when you are at a gig, and all synched up with all of your senses into what is coming out of the speakers, what the dj is kicking out to the crowd, and what they kick back to you and the dj, and you can play with the crowds mood, you can feel it, see it, sense it directly. And when people see that you are making it all happen LIVE, the content, the fx, the multiple sources and how it all synchs with the music, its a feeling that I just cant duplicate sitting in front of my machine and tweaking around.
VV: You've got a long list of famous DJs and musicians that you've played with, including Carl Craig, Jamiroquai, and an upcoming show with Digweed. What else is on your resume? Any show in particular that stands out?
MP: Ferry Corsten, Tiesto, deepdish (sooooo rocked), Dave Clarke, Mauro Picotto, James Lavelle, Richard Dorfmeister, Gotan Project, FC Kahuna, (AWESOME) Chris Liebing, Monika Kruse, Blake Baxter, DJ T-1000, Yunus Guvenen, Murat Uncuoglu, XPRESS 2 (rocked), Desyn Maciello, Legowelt, Damien Lazarus, (great!) DJ Smoke and MC Gogo (Mexico, love parade) and like a gazillion local Turkish dj's who are great that no one will probably know but I would like to mention: Disc Jockey Ari, Mabbas, DZA, Cervus, Fuchs, Agent Orange, Khan, BeeGee,...
The show with digweed I will do with dekam, on the 29th of January -- its going to soooo rock to do a show with the guy who started VIDVOX, and enabled my success as a VJ. There will be another Turkish video artist with us named Ali Demirel, who makes the videos for Ritchie Hawtin and Plasticman. He has awesome material. It'll be a 3 mixer jam with 12 projectors in an animated matrix with special software written by DeKam.
VV: What other sorts of projects are you working besides performing live visuals (ie. installations, studio work)? Do you find that your experiences performing video influence the way you approach these other projects?
MP: Live performances have definetely influenced the look of my studio work, as well as my working methods. I regularly use VDMX and GRID2 now as production tools -- both for their immediacy, and flexiblity. I just cant be bothered to wait while something renders, or to look at a frame by frame preview. I used to spend time dialing in the parameters in AE, but now i just create different stuff inside of VDMX and xport it with the dvr, working with a sound file on loop to drive the fx while i tweak them in real time until it looks how I want. Then I take those xports into GRID2 and arrange them around in the cells, and play with the sequence of things, which images flow well into each other. In the end, after I have done this I have a pretty good idea about how I will finish up a piece and jam through it really quickly in Final Cut Pro. You can literally churn out an interesting 4 minute piece for a music video or a presentation in one day like this, which looks like you spent weeks on. Being able to map multiple fx with individual transfer layers (mult, add, sub etc) and transparency on top of the original film in VDMX has really affected my sense of composition and driven my fascination with layering and reiteration. I remember my first video feedback experience -- putting a camera on a tripod and twisting it on an angle back and forth in front of a television with its own source, and how that fascinated me... and VDMX just takes that to the extreme level of trippiness. Its a way of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, AND being able to SHARE that experience with others. So thru having a lot of brand sponsors at many of the events that I work at has pushed that aesthetic (mtv mash helps it as well -- as does the whole remix culture which is driving rights-holders batty) into the mainstream, and more and more companies are willing to pay for having that look.
I just did a gig in Moscow for the Turkish government, for promoting Turkish Textiles, it was a black tie affair with ministers and politicians, champagne and caviar, and the 4 minute presentation film about Turkish fashion designers I produced entirely using VDMX, GRID2, and Final Cut. During the fashion show, I cut, mixed, and sampled original footage which I had pre-produced with live footage of the crowd and the performers - - for a straiter and more conservative audience you couldn't imagine, so far away from the club and art scene where almost all of the action is in live video performance -- and now the turkish minister of trade and the agency I did the job for are demanding a complete post event presentation in the same style because they claim that it is so "cutting edge" So, after finishing your questions, its back to VDMX, GRID2 and FCP to turn around the work in 24 hours.... both for its aesthetic, and speed in production.
VV: Looking at the bigger picture, do you have any insights or visions
of the future of live visuals?
MP:
One:
Multiply by five what you think is possible in the next 10 years, and divide the timeframe by three and get ready to be surprised by the power of the software and hardware that we will have at our fingertips doing things in real time that it took an array of silicon graphics workstations a week to render.
Two:
Expect Gaming engines to enter into your toolbox -- program complete environments that will react to sound and midi inputs.
Three:
People will still think that VJ's are the pair of tits that stare at them from the MTV Bluescreen, while almost all visuals running on that screen are being done by the real VJ's.