Technology

Often using a video mixer, VJs blend and superimpose various video sources into a live motion composition. In recent years, electronic musical instrument makers have begun to make specialty equipment for VJing.

Hardware

VJ hardware can be split into categories -

• Source hardware generates a video picture which can be manipulated by the VJ, e.g. video cameras and Video Synthesizers.
• Playback hardware plays back an existing video stream from disk or tape based storage mediums, e.g. VHS tape players and DVD players.
• Mixing hardware allows the combining of multiple streams of video e.g. a Video Mixer
• Effects hardware allows the adding of special effects to the video stream, e.g. Colour Correction units
• Output hardware is for displaying the video signal, e.g. Video projector, LED wall, or Plasma Screen.

History

The first written use of the word "video jockey" was used on the paycheck of Merrill Aldighieri in May of 1980. She had been improvising live interpretations of the DJ music 8 hours per night for several weeks in an experiment to create a visual componant to the music and lightshows in the club, using the newly installed video system which had TV monitors throughout the club hanging from the ceiling. Her studies in film with such innovators in animation and sound as Stan Brackage and Michael Snow, and her apprenticeship at Rhombex Studios in NYC using the first video synthesier in the late 70ies prepared her for this natural evolution of art and teqnology. She continued Vjing in several nightclubs in NYC through the 80ies and then became active in producing finished music video oriented programs for SONY, MTV, and experimental films and animations for PBS. She occassionally tours with highlights from her archives and continues to experiemnt in multi-media production.

To keep things in perspective one can note that the first television image broadcast was by Philo Taylor Farnsworth in 1929. In the 1950ies during the height of live TV innovators like Ernie Kovacs made artful use of technology and worked with a live audience to expand what the medium could do. However, as TV became more and more produced, it became more conservative and the chance to experiment live became less and less.

With the advent of the first audio synthesiers built by Bell Labs in the 70ies, image synthesizing was not far behind. An artist retreat in Owego New York called Experimental Television Center, founded in 1971, made contributions to the development of many artists by gathering the experimental hardware donated by such video art pioneers as Nam June Paik and Steve Rutt and made the equipment available to artists in a retreat setting where they could experiment freely. Much of this work was debued at the nightclub Hurrah which quickly became a new alternative outlet for video artists who could not get their avant garde productions aired on regular broadcast outlets. Similar music video evolution was happening in other major cities around the world and an underground alternative to TV developed in the nightclubs.