Welcome to the home of JG's VJ activities.

Swat+Prosthetic butt enhancer+mouse in maze+angry evangelist=???? Bodies morphing from thin to fat+confused contestant=???

One expects this kind of semiotic orchestration to be going on within a single show or commercial, however this 'connecting of sequential subtexts' is going on as you surf channels as well as from show to commercial to next commercial to tv promo to whatever comes next...If you watch tv a lot, you will see repeating juxtapositions, meanings created by repeating themes, obsessions, omissions, and contrasts. It is very similar to musical rhythmic cycles, only with symbolic/iconographic beats, and building up meaning over longer periods of time than typical musical forms. Because of this one doesn't 'read' these meanings consciously. One 'just sort of has a sensibility' from one's gut - a conscensus reality generated by this sequencing.

I am not talking about some "Beautiful Mind" kind of paranoid connecting of the dots. I don't think there is a conspiracy driving some specific agenda to the people via semiotic juxtapositions on TV. Yet! But the television media is controlled by a handful of corporations now. One of them is under constant scrutiny as a 'mouthpiece of the state'. But if a civilization is viewed as a singular being, this subtextual read of television is its subconsious.

After a show, sometimes someone will approach me and say "My God, I never saw TV in this way before, but it is so OBVIOUS now!".

There is something about seeing this imagery to music, not in the context of your living room, that gives you the ability to disengage from its agenda and really see it in a detached light. It is at once disengagement and reengagement. It points out the obsessions, dreams and fears (the neuroses?) broiling under the surface.

Here is a quicktime example: It's a big file. (27megs-9minutes!) The music is arbitrary but typical of what is playing when I do these gigs...

vj example (DIVX codec)

'Synthetic' (modified or self-constructed) imagery

I have issues with simple 'pattern-to-music' VJ material. It is too easy for software to generate abstract imagery to go with music. It is also pretty much without content. I find that sort of stuff like wallpaper, or a lava light. Which is fine, but I find this more interesting.

I've been integrating text now and then. Main theme lately has been 'Reduce and Amplify', which is an observation about most media. Reduce (simplify) the subject and Amplify that one aspect of it. I think it bleeds into existence in general these days. Communication has become less and less about detail and increasingly about an exaggerated shorthand.

I've also been capturing people on television and slowing down the footage way down. I'll scrutinize the subjects frame-to-frame changes in facial expression. You'll find incredibly telling changes in just 1/30 of a second, but almost ONLY in 'non-actors'; contestants, talk show guests, etc. I can only surmise that these 'microexpressions' are truly emotionally generated. Actors rarely do it. They aren't emotionally involved with what they are doing/saying. Try it sometime, it's really interesting! I 'rate' the frame-by-frame expressions on a set of criteria and make a graph that moves in synch to the subject. For instance 'yellow-shirted-gameshow-guy'. His expressions took place over about a second in real time. It appears as a thoughtful blink at that speed. I didn't even notice it until I slowed it down. He seemed pretty 'together' in real time, but slowing it down, you could see that this contestant was vacillating between thrilled - and scared shitless within a second.

You will also see other visuals obviously not from television. These usually are experiments I've done over the years, which I will use them when appropriate.

9/23/04
Did a couple of perfomances, one at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis MN (Also have an installation there) and another at Velouria Lounge, Savannah GA.

INTERESTING READING:
I've been reading a book on Burroughs recently, called "Retaking the Universe". It brought up a lot of WSB's cut-up theories, which I will excerpt from:

"Ancient Mayan society, as presented in The Soft Machine, offers one archetype here. The priests exercise direct control over the consciousness of the populace, by possessing 'codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances - These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought'....The Mayan control system is therefore direct and total, but by the same token, highly vulnerable. Modern control systems, premised simultaneously on the fully developed individual and her enrollment in her own subordination, are less stable 'riddled with contradictions', according to Burroughs, but at the same time less static, and so ultimately less fragile."
In other words "messages that say one thing but mean another are being used to control the populace. The explicit says one thing, but the message is in the implicit".

--Network television can be seen as the modernization of the Mayan System, the 'rotating codices of symbols' now embedded in 'infotainment' and working as a subconscious control system. Perhaps obvious on the surface of most blatant shows and networks (i.e. Fox News) but workinng more insidiously within the subtextual/symbolic realm of more 'innocent' imagery, especially within its juxtapositional context.

SITUATIONISM

Of course I should mention Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", the all-time great Situationist manifesto of postmodernism. From "Retaking the Universe" again, regarding the Situationists and their use of cut-up:

"Chief among the tactics by means of which such resistance expresses itself is what the Situationists called 'detournement', which is quite siilar to the practice of cut-ups that Burroughs carried on throughout the 1960s. Detournement, 'the signature of the situationist movement, the sigh of its presence and contestation in contemporary cultural reality' (IS editorial committee 1959:55-6), is the tactic of using the throwaway images of the spectacle against it by removing images or signs from their original or authorized spectacular contexts and placing them in completely different subversive contexts."

 

5/15/05

My Father happened to have a book out from the library, called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell over Christmas break, when I was visiting. This book spends a great deal of space discussing microexpressions, and two major researchers named Friesen and Ekman. Really amazing stuff. They identified about 3000 different facial gestures. Check the Ekman link. He's been hired by the FBI and CIA because of his work! I'll have to send him a copy of a piece I made, called Faces.