Vague Terrain

Introducing VJ Practices

VJing is commonly understood as the act of mixing projected video 'live' at an event, usually alongside music, as an entertainment or art practice. The meaning of the acronym 'VJ' is very much disputed, with suggestions ranging from 'video-jockey' to 'video-jamming'. In most cases the VJ mixes a continuous flow of visual imagery alongside a stream of music. VJs frequently use short video clips looped for continuous playback to build the image flow, commonly using laptop computers running specialist VJ software. Other playback sources such as DVD players may be utilized, and multiple sources can be combined using a video mixer.

The accounts of VJ practices featured in this paper are drawn from two periods of fieldwork undertaken in London, during spring and summer 2007, consisting of participant observation, interviewing, and online ethnography of internet message boards. Depictions of VJ practices are both enhanced and complicated by my own previous experience as a VJ, although I am now a lapsed member of the community, having not been active for around two years.

I understand VJing as a term-in-motion; a momentary congealment of a diverse and expanding set of practices, both material and discursive. As a terrain it is structured by difference; diffuse actors individually and collectively negotiate the boundaries of VJ practices, producing and shaping the ways in which VJing can be spoken and thought. Identity practices associated with VJing develop, shaping and defining the 'VJ' persona. VJing is a globally evolving set of practices, engaging people from all around the world, who network together in communities that develop through both talking about and 'doing' VJing. Some of the largest VJ communities exist online, interacting together through the use of internet message boards. The largest of these, VJForums.com has a global membership of 12,900, with a sister open-publishing site holding articles written by and for the community on all aspects of VJ practices.

One interesting tension I encountered during fieldwork sessions with VJs was the idea that VJing was incredibly difficult to describe. Classificatory discussions on what a VJ 'is' or does reappear frequently on VJForums. Discussions sometimes they seek to build a consensus around the term, and other times the high level of differentiation between VJ practices become a source of friction or frustration.

Right then.....WE ARE ALL VISUAL VIDEO MEDIA GRAPHIC ARTISTS....that's VVMGA to all you DJs & DJ influenced promoters out there!!!!¹

And yet VJs were able to recognize and respond to each other across traditional 'differences' such as age, class, gender and nationality, on a public message board. VJs seemed to find it easier to define the core convergences in VJ practices, and those practices that were not 'VJing', leaving a large area somehow ungraspable. Using the framework of Simondon's individuation, I want to try to resolve this unintelligibility through a new view on VJs' interaction with technical objects, and with each other collectively. I want especially to consider how the technical is implicated in relations that may otherwise be thought of as exclusively 'social'.

VJing is an extremely interesting set of practices, undertaken differently across communities, and as such remaining extremely 'open'. Although VJs usually get paid for their performances, this is frequently unrepresentative of the full costs involved in producing 'visuals' and as such few VJs can successfully pursue VJing solely as a career. Many VJs perform on weekends, alongside a wide variety of other related jobs. Flows of capital do run through VJing as a field, but do not fully structure it. VJing has not been solidified as a global technical practice in political or economic relations that act as constraining forces. It is still a shifting and heterogeneous field, open to the kinds of inter-human relations that are central to Simondon's framework.

Introducing Simondon

In order to apprehend 'technology' Simondon (1992, 2007) employs a unique approach, exploring the genesis through which technological objects emerge. Simondon rejects anthropomorphic characterizations of technology as means only, and repudiates common understandings of technology through hylomorphism, the union of matter and form. He rejects any stable ontological status for technology, rather conceiving of technology as evolving through ongoing relationality. Technicity, alongside concretization, are significant terms Simondon uses to understand the complex processes through which technology as sets of relations form and are vitalized.

An exploration of technicity as a 'mode of being' can begin with the technological structures Simondon identifies. He makes a distinction between three types of technical forms: the technical element, the technical individual and the technical ensemble. Technical elements are the 'simplest' objects discussed by Simondon, with examples focusing on hand tools, such as a knife (Mackenzie, 2002 p. 12) or sewing needle (Harding, 1995). These objects can be isolated from their context quickly and easily, and do not need any infrastructures to function. They are mobile and transferable, and can be widely dispersed and used across a multitude of different communities. For these reasons, Simondon considers technical elements to have a high technicity.

The technical element has a set of properties that allow it to perform a particular set of functions, rendering it useful in different ways. A hand tool such as a rake is solid and retains the particular shape that allows it to collect materials. Rather than ascribing the rake a set of 'essential' qualities, or defining it purely in terms of its use to humans, Simondon's notion of technicity pertains to the convergence of different realities that allow the rake to become the object that it is. The qualities of the rake are derived from the hardness of the metal that make it, the design of the teeth and handle, the quality of their production and many other aspects. The rake incorporates a set of realities that are geographical, financial, physical and social. Technicity results from the stabilization of this set of divergent realities through time and space into a localizable network of relations that allow the rake to perform its task.

The technicity of the technical ensemble is much more difficult to apprehend, as these are themselves formed from technical elements, technical individuals and sub-ensembles. Each element within the ensemble is emerging coextensively with the environment in which it exists. These elements and their 'milieus' mutually shape each other. In some cases the technical individual conditions itself through what Simondon terms an 'associated milieu'. Just as in the case of the rake, each technical element that composes the ensemble is a stabilized cluster of forces or relations, and as they mutually shape each other, and are shaped by the milieu, many different realities are brought into contact. An analysis of the technicity of a technical ensemble would need to explore the mutual conditioning of the sub-ensembles, technical individuals and elements that make up the ensemble. Many common technical objects must be thought of as technical ensembles, as they cannot be isolated from a well-developed infrastructure.

A technical object such as a mobile phone cannot be understood as a discrete entity. According to Simondon's view the 'mobile phone' is a complex ensemble, of which the phone handset is only one part. Common understandings of the phone are partly created through the aesthetics of use of the handset itself. In use the phone appears to be discrete entity that can be appropriated, owned or used in a multitude of ways. Theorists such as Bruno Latour (2005) have explored how technological objects are apprehended as 'black boxes', where a wider relationality is collapsed artificially into a solidified entity. In the case of the phone the relationship to the larger network comes into view only when the network breaks down. When the signal is low and the phone ceases to work, users must reposition themselves in space to connect to the network once more. The mobile phone, once assumed to be a device whose essential function is to enable mobility, can now be seen as an object massively constrained by the layering of infrastructures required, in contrast to the simple hand tool. Technicity in this ensemble cannot be apprehended directly, but is distributed across all the technical elements that make up the ensemble. Technicity is the degree to which disparate realities temporarily converge within a technical object. In this case the technicity of the mobile phone is low.

To fully apprehend the meaning of Simondon's term technicity, we need to explore the processes of 'concretization' that inform it. If technicity is understood as the degree to which diverse realities become stabilized within an object, then concretization describes the process of temporary congealment. A further exploration of this term can be undertaken through the exploration of the technical ensemble that enables the VJ's live performance.

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