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The Book

The Art as Research

  Janez Strehovec

 

In the contemporary humanities the issues concerning power, social and gender relations are getting more and more privileged at the expense of the research in new media specificity as it is discussed in terms of aesthetics, the internet studies, software cultures and philosophy. Methods and approaches are not neutral tools, employed by researcher they play a crucial part in shaping and understanding the phenomena observed, so the current methodological matrix based on activism, hactivism, gender, power relations, globalisation and the empire criticism has a big influence on the ways we approach the new media. This turn towards political issues referring to activism, e-resistance, e-civil disobedience, digital divide, new forms of social and political gathering (e. g. flash-mobbing) has actually a significant raison d'etre in the most recent breaking news - and ground zero- driven societies, however there are other significant fields in the contemporary humanities which could not be left behind as non-essential and trivial.

This article is provoked by VJ-ing as a contemporary practice of making (sampling, mixing, remixing…) hybrid images that challenge the way people see, perceive and imagine. VJ-ing occurs at the intersection of various fields and practices by traversing artlike performances, software culture and clubcultures, e.g. bOtimotiOn project of Amy Alexander. We are facing a new generation of images as bullets that tactile hit the spectator and put her in a certain state of immersion. The screen is not a remote window anymore, it is here in the “closeness that grows towards the user” (Strehovec 2000a), and our vision is getting more and more tactile. At the beginning of 21th century the VJ is becoming the proto-artist and the proto-researcher whose hybridised procedures sample, remix and recombine the art forms-as-we-know-them with the practices of research, critical software, clubbing, and programming in order to create an immersive and attractive experience of the in-between spaces and practices that intersect various fields and modes of perceptions. The notion that “c onscientious VJs use the methods of the artistic avant-garde as a model of pure research investigation into issues like how images ‘behave' and take on a life of their own” (Amerika 2006) is not a strange one in the most recent present understood in terms of the blurring the boundaries and gaps between “two cultures” (Snow), various disciplines, different fields and modes people do services and jobs, and interact with the environment. The practice of DJ-ing demonstrates a turn from the art and cultures of (stable, authoritative) artefacts to the art as a hybrid practice of the in-between spaces, which occurs as an event, performance and service.

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Other text extracts

VJing and Live A/V Practices
Narrative Motors
The Number-Image
The Contrary of the Movie Theater
The Art as Research
Excerpts from 'Portrait of a VJ'
The Aura of the Digital
VJ Scene: Spaces With Audiovisual Scores