VJ: Musicality of the Digital Image

Although EM15is truly over, I cannot help looking back. Without revisiting every part of a festival that was a real success, the visual component is what impressed me most. That realization came during Metropolis 2, one of the many evenings designed for our sensitivity aselectronic-music lovers. The multimedia performances supporting the DJs appeared to me as complete performances in their own right.

The visual artist is no longer what they once were. Rooted in their time and shaped by increasingly rapid technological change, this practice has developed into several major schools, but the essential point remains the manipulation of images in synchronization with music, in real time or otherwise. To be a VJ is to be a musician of the image.

Montréal VJ Diagraf dazzled

me. His visual language accompanied the DJs Voice from the Lake and Max Cooper, adapting to their musical worldsand writing a unique story for each of them. One can feel the influence of cinema in Patrick Trudeau’s creations, whose ambient effects follow a precise narrative thread. I find a certain poetry in this treatment of the image, deconstructed and reinvented to produce a meaning that is more or less intentional. I especially loved his accompaniment to the sounds of Max Cooper.

VJ Jason Corder is an artist and musician from Denver. His abstract style invites us into a visual and moving universe. Also a musician, he immediately reveals the influence of the natural world in his music and videos. I would say he is even more focused than Diagraf on creating an atmosphere. His live performance during A/visions 2 was afine demonstration of complementarity with the richness of the album Re: ECM by Berliners Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, a blend of several musical genres including jazz on an electroacoustic and electronic foundation.

The visual artist is playful and inventive, drawing on

every possible creation to offer us a conceptual language that leans gently toward dreams. I could have put my hands over my ears and still been able to hear the music. Or rather, in this case, to see it. The digital image is a living, vibrating element under the control of a fertile imagination, and it is simply beautiful!