The Very Eye of Night Response

Maya Deren's, "The Very Eye of Night" serves as a fundamental building block for the genre of experimental film, or the Avante-garde form of art.Deren superimposes two forms of video over one another and creates an effect that may have wowed audiences when it was first released. Deren uses this non-narrative film to give the audience a feeling of dancing in space, without spending a huge budget on sets and props, seen in Melies' A Trip to the Moon. While I can appreciate the history of this film but as film enthusiast and filmmaker, I'm not particularly fond of this work. While I enjoy many different forms of art and film, it felt dry. For it's time it is a great film, but to todays standards in visual projection production it doesn't come close in todays market. Overall, a good introduction to a genre of film that doesn't necessarily derive meaning in film or rather, contain a complex narrative. It simply serves a purpose to be visually and aesthetically pleasing to those who view it. And who knows, maybe you can derive your own meaning.

Responding to “The Very Eye of Night”

Hello everyone,

On a personal level, I, long mired in the monotonous nature of my academic discipline of History, have never truly grasped the feel of cinematic art, or ever gained a full appreciation for its movements and paradigms. To me art was another historical fact, an expression of the timeline meant only to prove a historical pattern and nothing more. So, I must honestly profess that this class has truly opened a whole new interesting world for me to explore. Maya Deren’s work was, at first pass, unimpressive to a mind unfamiliar with experimental cinematography. I found its lack of a structured narrative unappealing. Coming from History structure and narrative was all I knew, but somehow Deren’s work managed to intrigue me the more I watched it. I found myself enthralled by the dancers overlaid on the moving star field, and their ghostlike forms and repetitive dances coupled with rhythmic procession gave the work a very primordial feel. It reminded me of primitive cultural beliefs of spirits amongst the heavens. Mind you, when I say “primitive”, I am not trying to be little the work, but rather I mean to say that it speaks to our natural human tendency to be fascinated by the mysterious and almost spiritual nature of the night. The work became a theme or motif in it of itself; without the need of structured narrative or the like. While I could also comment about the technical aspects of the work such the dancers being shown in photographic negative, the overlaid images, and likewise, it was more the impact of the film that interested me as a projection designer. Patricia Moran noted that it was important that “Space/time, projection and experiential: sentient and feeling, visible and visionary are part of the experience.”, and I believe Deren’s work is a great example of these aspects of the theory behind the “VJ” and “VJing”. I am truly thankful for being in this class because of what I am being exposed to, and though I may be elementary in my observations of artistic work, I can certainly appreciate the impact.

-Nathan D.

The New DJ and Then Some

For me, I've never quite understood the role of a DJ. Like if I were at a club or a dance party, I wouldn't really notice the DJ. He's just in his own world doing his thing while everybody's dancing, but after watching some videos like the one to the left, they deserve a lot more credit for what they do and the difficulty of it. However, the DJ is already becoming a thing of the past. Now there are VJ's! Visual jockey, video jockey, video-jam? Whatever it's called, this new sensation is establishing its place quickly in today's society.




The art of VJ-ing seems very similar to DJ-ing. However, on the flip side, VJ-ing also seems to contain a much more poetic aspect than DJ-ing does. In those live sessions, creating sounds and images channeled through synthesizers can be very abstract, and as Peter Weibel and Gene Youngblood did, using multiple projections really makes VJ-ing stand out. It's just a lot more fascinating than DJ's because it contains a visual aspect. The more senses that it reaches out to, the more exciting it becomes. Additionally, with VJ's, I imagine audiences paying more attention to the visual projections in awe rather than the typical dance party scene for DJ's. But VJ-ing is definitely appropriate for the dance floor still as the article states. Adapting to the temperature of the dance floor by changing images and volume, I imagine, can really spice things up and add a really nice element to a party. It's this idea of immersion-- being taken to a whole new world through these visual projections. It gets me excited just thinking of the capabilities of this field.

Anyhow, I found this sweet video of a video projection on a building. If anyone is starting to enjoy the weather, this Christmas music should help that feeling.

The "VJ"

Patricia Moran’s article, “VJ Scene: Spaces with Audiovisual Scores, focuses on the acronym VJ to attempt to explain the meaning behind the abbreviation through what it stood for historically. Moran goes on to look at the first “official” VJ’s on MTV and explained their importance as being background support to the DJ’s. Though they are important as they were an example of improvised mix tracks being enhanced by images, Moran distances the idea of VJing to something more organic in which the image is not presented but warped and manipulated to “provoke concept associations”. It is this concept that she focuses on as she explores the idea of the “VJ” and the different meanings the acronym has. In seceding examples, she always points out in the techniques used by “video jockeys” the importance of real-time addition of effects and mixing images, and if such is not possible she highlights the importance of an organic way of presenting the work (i.e. randomization) from a constrained set of preselected images.

I found this exploration into the conceptual practices and theory of VJing really enlightening in that it was able to clear up, though not entirely I must admit, some of my reservations in separating the art of VJing from just recorded production. Perhaps the most interesting part of this article was the small section in the end entitled “A few pacts”. She talks about the projection work as an experience that effects the audience’s perception of elements such as space and time. The “pact” she describes is the pact that the audience makes to become immersed in the enjoyment of the work much like one loses oneself in a work of fiction, and it is up to VJ to not only create the environment, but make the audience want to accept this “pact” with your work.

One of the names brought up by Patricia Moran in her article was Gregory Markoupoulos, who was a Greek-American experimental filmmaker who worked from the 1940s on whose works were the precursors for the theory of VJing.

Here's an example of one of his works called "Sorrows".