Essay notes and quotes - A VJ Centered Exploration of Expressive Interacti

 Film captures and portrays the “elusive details” of situations [3] that other methods of presentation, such as a vocal or textual description, may miss.

By presenting our ideas through film we therefore enable the VJs to observe their practice from our point of view and consequently engage with and discuss it with this perspective in mind.

VJ practice is both public facing and personally significant

Qualitative research determines outcomes through their participants and is very much driven by the outlooks of these practitioners

We stress how the technical challenge posed by the presentation of 3D visuals limits the ability of the VJ to improvise and experiment in the moment of performance

this narrative is illustrated by a graffiti artist whose sketch pad is projected behind the passages. The audience responds to this evolving narrative by entering further passages of text; as such a dialogue develops between the performer, graffiti artist and the audience.

Andrew and Toby discussed a desire to evoke particular experiences within the audience.

 Andrew explained how the 3D visuals in his performance were designed to stir up feelings of astonishment or amazement.

ambiguous materials could create thought provoking experiences:

“A bit of footage will be very blurred and you will just get a sense of what’ s happening and it’ s all about building up your own sort of thoughts about what’s happening or what the story is about.” (Andrew)

Significant weight was attributed to the desire for a meaningful performance... re- contextualizing found footage.

Why do narrative based films work well with music performance?

Participants spoke of wanting to “get hold of” and“grapple with” media. This implies a desire for interaction that provides a sensation akin to being in direct contact or touching and molding media as if it were an artifact in the physical world.

Paul illustrated an existing device that affords Haptically Direct interaction. He compared how the turntable gives him the sense of touching and feeling the sound in the videos he is manipulating:

“I've got this really gestural interface that is a turntable I can really feel the sound in the video, whereas if you've got something that’s plastic, costs about 80 quid and you are trying to, I dunno. You don't get the same kind of feel, experience, interaction.

An immediate response to an action was considered essential to many.

“The latency, well it’s not ideal especially for scratching so I'm trying to move away from time-coded vinyl.” (Paul)

“I want something that I can directly grapple with the media that I'm dealing with. At the moment I have a planar flight deck of buttons and knobs and that has got nothing to for effecting and controlling what you want to do

A live performance was described by the VJs as providing the opportunity to experiment and improvise with the creation and manipulation of visual media. Improvisation was described in wholly positive terms by participants who associated it with satisfaction, interest, play and artistic freedom: