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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