Vague Terrain

I would like to explore these notions of Simondon's through an investigation of the VJ's experience of performance as an active part of the technical ensemble, and as part of the milieu of the event in a wider sense. I would like to discuss the performances of a VJ collective called Inside-Us-All at an event called Acid Monkey, which I visited during my fieldwork. This event was a bustling, 'psychedelic' club night playing trance music of different kinds. It took place in a large club underneath a large intersecting set of railway tunnels under London Bridge station. Decorations were festooned across the space; cathedrals of stretchy fabric were lit from below alongside many screens differing in size and shape in each room. Sets of hexagonal screens illuminated the main room, showing a stream of video of lush vegetation projected by three members of the Inside-Us-All collective, who are renowned for their progressive screen configurations, and the intensive technical configurations required to support them. Inside-Us-All were performing in this instance from a mezzanine floor behind the music system, which at once concealed them and yet afforded them an excellent view of the audience. Their setup was comprehensive, consisting of many laptops plugged in to multiple video mixers to allow multiple performers to improvise or 'jam' together. In this case I don't want to repeat an analysis of the technological objects making up the ensemble, but rather to focus on the relationship between the VJs, the technical ensemble and the milieu of the 'event'.

To all appearances, the VJ as stable subject is using the technology to trigger, manipulate or layer video loops in response the music or aspects of the event's atmosphere. This notion of relationality between the milieu and the performer is central to how VJing is defined across VJ communities. Mark America theorises that the VJ might be 'a hyperimprovisational narrative artist who uses banks of quicktime movie clips to construct on-the-fly stories composed of images processed in asynchronous realtime and through various theoretical and performative filters' or perhaps 'a creative writer who manipulates matter and memory by composing live acts of image écriture repositioning the movie loop as the primary semantic unit of energy' (Amerika, 2005). The VJ can be thought of as a filter through which the club environment is refracted, and according to VJ Many2 this responsiveness is a crucial aspect of VJing.

First, no matter what his base video material might be, there is the notion of reacting to other stimuli (mainly music, but also a whole bunch of other parameters, like the environment, the lighting, etc.)²

However, within Simondon's framework, the VJ does not have a stable ontological status and rather is emergent as part of the milieu of the event. We can refocus Many2's account to explain that the technical ensemble of the VJ setup (including the VJ performer) cannot be dissociated from the milieu of the event, and that these two condition each other. The relationship between the ensemble and milieu is recursive, as discussed through the process of temporal reticulation. This complex temporality that Simondon describes allows us to explore technicity as a network of distributed nodes, undergoing recurring resumptions. I want to explore the differential temporalities encountered in VJ practices through Simondon's ontogenetic emergent network system.

temporality and performance

Can the VJ event be explored as in situation in which the relationality Simondon describes becomes intelligible? VJ practices encompass a set of enfolded realities. Just as the 'orders' of these topographies are different, so are their temporalities, which are folded and re-folded into each other. The notion of performing 'live' during an event is central to VJing.

I believe the notion of real-time performance from a video artist is essential to the definition of what a VJ is … real-time performance is one of the main (if not the main) notion that defines what a VJ is …³

As VJ Many2 comments, the temporality most significant in terms of VJ performance is that of 'real time,' defined by Mackenzie as 'where the interval between the triggering of an event and its processing/ reception falls beneath the threshold of sensible perception (i.e. faster than conscious thought)' (Mackenzie 2002, p. 151). The technical setup of the VJ is optimized towards ever faster real-time processing, towards a greater experience of speed, and in terms of VJ technology, 'responsiveness'. However, as Mackenzie's sensitive analysis of speed illustrates, speed can only be experienced in terms of differences in speed. As such, 'speed is always relative to delay' (2002, p. 122).

The VJ's experience of instantaneous playback is dependent on the speed of processing of the VJ's technical setup. If the equipment has a poor level of processing 'power', the VJ may have to negotiate lags or delays in the triggering of clips or processing of effects. Delays are foundational to the collective experience of VJing in real-time. The V4 video-mixers that act as mediators between the video streams of Rodger, Dave and Pesh from Inside-Us-All are only able to process data in real-time through the manipulation of delays.

The V4 handles PAL video signals, which are composed of video frames with a sync pulse between them. The mixer uses a time base corrector to match the sync between the incoming streams of video, so that they can be overlaid and mixed between. Without the time base corrector, mixing would be extremely problematic due to sync inconsistencies. The time base corrector generates an internal common reference signal and delays the incoming video stream by aligning the sync pulse between frames with the internal reference signal. The analogue video streams are then converted to digital to apply algorithmic effects and converted back to an analogue signal to output.⁴

Temporal reticulation allows us to explore the VJ ensemble as series of resumptions and delays. For Mackenzie, 'real time attempts to collapse the intervals between an event and its reception, so that the event is structured by its processing' (Mackenzie 2002, 168). Real-time processing can be seen to collapse the interval between the triggering of a clip, and its playback. The very act of composing an image flow is itself constructed by the processing of the image, through the technical ensemble of the VJ setup. 

The event in which the VJ performs can be characterised as something contingent, transitory and impermanent: as potentiality. Massumi calls the event an 'interval of change, the in-itself of transformation … a time-form from which the passing present is excluded and which, for that very reason, is as future as it is past, looping directly from one to the other. It is the immediate proximity of before and after (2002, 58).

Massumi explores the event as a moment in which linear time is collapsed, where the present is not experienced as the 'now' between past and future but rather where time is transformed, and past and future flow into each other. This formulation allows us to see the kind of temporality that is enabled by the relationality between elements in a technical ensemble. Through temporal reticulation we have explored the complex temporality of the relations between technical elements within the ensemble. Massumi's formulation of the event allows us to see that the relations of differential temporality within the technical ensemble can interact. Through the relationality of the technical ensemble, what is 'past' and 'future' intermingle.

I want to explore how the emergent temporality of the event and the relational temporal character of the ensemble effect the 'moment' of VJ performance. During fieldwork with VJs, the experience of performance was one of the most difficult aspects of VJ practice to apprehend, and one that provoked very emotional responses. VJs commented on different experiences of time; a 'good indication of a "Zone" is when you start your set, blink and it's time to go home.' If a performance experience was not good, it might be thought of as taking a long time, or being a painful experience of time 'I had times, when I couldn't wait for it to be over.' ⁵. The moment of performance, in which the VJ is building image flows from clips, is one in which culturally-instituted clock time dissolves, and the processes of performance take on their own temporality. The living entity is individuating as part of the VJ ensemble, in relation with the also-developing milieu of the event. The moment of VJ performance is produced through the resumptions of the ensemble in development, and the transductive restructurings of ensemble and milieu.

Performative composition is asignifying eventness. Action, movement, affect is nonrepresentational knowing; is in a sense, superempirical to representation. The event produces meaning without the baggage of signification. It generates the force of a translation process, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it. (Doruff, 2006, p.71).

Sher Doruff explores the moment of performative composition, in the case of the VJ, the image flow, as 'eventness,' situated outside the realm or representation. For her the event produces 'meaning' outside representationalist formulations. This has great resonances with Simondon's ontogenesis, where the ensemble produces meaning relationally via the technical ensemble, evolving through restructuring. The importance of the relation between VJ and milieu is something that I would like to explore further, as the temporality of the moment seems to depend on the kinds of affects moving across the network, as VJ Jasper explains.

[F]or me, it is like the energy of the event, the party people, the visuals, the music, builds like a wave, and i can feel it rising up and up. unexpected sync-ups of random visuals and audio cues seem magical and serve to enhance the feeling, so i like to work in the known and unknown zones - stepping up to the boundaries, and stepping past the mark sometimes.⁶

experience and internal resonance

These testimonies infer that VJs are directly experiencing the transformations between individual and milieu during the contingent moment of the event. Ilan Katin comments:

I recall one of the earlier performances we did together. I distinctly remember looking up from my computer at Lance standing inside the visuals and thinking "this is what it's all about". What "it" is exactly I can't say for sure, but I know that "it" motivates me.⁷

In the example of Ilan, 'it' does not fit into an emotional sphere that he has already experienced, but it is a potent feeling. Those who experience intensities through performance often understand these as a passage through a zone of indetermination.

It's exactly that kind of live interaction that distinguishes between a live performance and a push play button performance. Its those moments that I live for, that make all the hard work worth it when the beat drops out and then predicting when its gonna blow up again and responding intuitively with the visual action.⁸

The question of intuition is an interesting one. I want to try to understand these experiences as a dimension of Simondon's relational ensemble. One line of enquiry begins with an exploration of the interior milieu that Simondon describes within the living entity, which works to individuate the living entity alongside relationality with the exterior milieu. In the case of a living being, the activity of individuation does not take place entirely on the border of the entity as with the technical object. Rather, inside the living entity there exists 'internal resonance'. Resolution of problems or tensions in the individuations of living being does not solely come from adaptation of the relationship between it and its milieu but through the invention of new internal structures. The living entity encounters problems and tensions through the process of individuation, to which the being's internal resonance responds by actually becoming 'information' for itself.

Thus the regime of internal resonance is able to mediate between the divergent orders that constitute the being in individuation. Simondon comments: 'The living being can be considered to be a node of information that is being transmitted inside itself — it is a system within a system, containing within itself a mediation between two different orders of magnitude' (1995, p. 306). In this framework, the individual brings about its own individuation, through actualization of the latent potentials in the system in a restructuring of itself and its milieu. The living being produces itself through continuous individuation, and is as Simondon terms a 'theater of individuation … The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system and also a system that individuates itself' (1995, p. 305). The living being can translate its relation to itself into 'information', where that term denotes a specific usage by Simondon. Could the intuitive experiences of VJ performance be created through individuation between the external and internal milieus?

The VJ is part of a wider technical ensemble, and is also a site of interaction between internal and external milieus (through internal resonance). Internal resonance as a stream of information interior to the living entity enacts a set of structurations within it. Internal resonance as a catalyst for restructuring of the field of the living entity allows for development, memory and anticipation, in contrast to the technical individual. These relations are themselves subject to a complex temporality.  

Although it cannot be identified with duration, intuition is a movement by which thought emerges from and recognises its own relation to duration and thus the relations of difference and entwinement it has with other durations. Duration is the reality in which intuition finds itself... (2006,  p. 235)

At the event Acid Monkey, Inside-Us-All performed video clips filmed by one member, Rodger, on his recent trip to India. These loops, the memories of Rodger, were re-actualized in performance; transgressed and woven into a new memory as part of a moving visual flow composed collectively alongside other VJs. This new memory will itself undergo the same re-processing. As such the life practices of several VJs are woven into their performances, flowing together fluidly as the experiences of a group of VJs are mixed and remixed into one collective ongoing text, iterated differently during the complex temporality and contingency of the VJ event as a milieu, and also in conjunction with the internal resonances of the VJs performing those clips.

The process of playing collaboratively re-actualised Rodger's memories, bringing these into the memories of the other VJs. In this sense we can see how Rodger's clips (as they were actualised by Pesh and Dave) were part of the external milieu (for Pesh and Dave) that shapes these individuals through the interactions between internal resonance and external milieu. The restructuring prompted by the experience of performing Rodger's clips collectively, then becomes the ground from which another structration can progress. In this sense the VJs are individuating collectively through VJ performance. The psychic orders of memory and imagination were incorporated in this analysis, and I would like to explore further how Simondon understands this psychic realm to be part of the technical ensemble, and how collective individuation might enable new ways of understanding human collectives.

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