book + dvd – Laurence King Publishing, ISBN 185669490
This is the first adequately documented VJ culture compendium. Even if vjing is only one of the many possible mutual relationships between sound and visual developed in the last twenty years of personal computing, it’s has become clear that it is a pop(ular) form of performance art, able to dissect the cinematic medium through software powered machines. The worldwide selection of vj crews Faulkner compiled highlights some of the finest experiments in a relatively large community. As in every artistic field it is not about the latest software version, but the ideas that an artist is able to show during the cutting process. If any, two basic characteristics are (or should be) always present: the narrative non-linearity and the evidence of its real-time occurring. But vjing is also about the technical side, proven by the rest of us that never realized how to really start to play with it. So the final section has been reserved to detailed groups technical sets plus some tutorials. That was not only a window open to the other side of the stage, but a production statement and an attempt of sharing the personal tricks of the trade. The resulting overview is video more and more close to scenography on a stage with many multiple sources that push ‘light’ and ‘perspective’ perception to the edge. The productive elite of a generation is so expressing the synthesis of swallowing one hundred years of cinematic visuals all at once. Vjing is really not only the dj ‘paradigm’ applied to visual, but the resulting live enthusiastic experiment of mixing the many visual dialects (web design, video art, experimental cinema, 3D abstraction, animation, 8mm footage, …) and many amazingly coded hybrids to everything that can be rendered as a sequence of (apparently moving) pictures. In the end a testbed for the whole future visual culture.