Addictive TV

Courtesy of artist

"Errr… I’m not sure I totally understand what you guys do." is something we often hear, particularly with respect to our media remixing work using audiovisual sampling. Most people understand about music and sound samples; but when you add moving images into the mix, it seems to confuse matters. Normally we say, do you want the long or the short answer? In short we’re simply audiovisual artists and producers, creating and performing work which highly synchronises images and music. The longer answer, however, goes something like…

In a digital age where music sampling and remixing is taken for granted, the same sampling (r)evolution is now happening across other media.  Contemporary audiovisual artists working with cut-up, mash-up and scratch video are remixing pretty much anything they can–with film, TV and music videos set to be the next hot sampling sources.  With the growing convergence of visuals and music, a lot of cut-up work is moving away from its roots in the world of video art and becoming more overtly musical, and dare it be said, entertaining, at least to those who don’t always get craft-lite conceptual video art.

A highly selective tour of relevant influences to what we do could start with pioneering video artists like the late Nam June Paik, who in the early 70s made a visual synthesiser, his TV cello, and Global Groove–arguably the first "media mash-up."  In the mid-80s came the "scratch TV" of the UK’s Duvet Brothers and their sampled videos became emblematic of the scratch technique of exposing meaning by repetition and juxtaposition.  Unconventional 80s promos like Paul Hardcastle’s 19 used AV sampled footage and in the late 80s, a pioneering US group called Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) emerged, evolving the practice of sampling both audio and video to create new "AV" tracks.

Today, AV artists are finding new avenues opening up, away from the alternative art and club worlds into more commercial arenas. Predictably there are a few misguided cries about selling out to the corporate beast, but we’d say that if experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, that early genius of visual music, could work for Disney on Fantasia, then it’s OK for others to follow suit. With us, whether it’s art for art’s sake or commercial entertainment, we still make things the way we want. With our recent movie remix, used to promote New Line’s Antonio Bandaras vehicle Take The Lead, we were given total creative freedom–remixing five hours of rushes into a three minute AV track, a dream job as we’re really into work where what you see is what you hear and vice-versa.

Alongside this mainstream push by artists, hardware like Pioneer’s DVJ-X1 DVD turntables make audiovisual mixing/remixing more of a practical proposition.  What you could once do with audio, you can now do with audio and video at the same time, and a whole new generation of artists working with both are emerging.

Our background was in television, producing rather leftfield shows back in the early 90s, which along the way introduced us to the VJ scene and the whole idea of visual remixing, and from there it just grew. In the past, as producers, we’d dallied with the idea of feature films, until the harsh realities of pitching weird European arthouse movies in three words or less to moguls who thought Eisenstein’s first name was Albert, sunk in and we decided to stick with the bizarre world of late-night TV. But now, all these years later, it’s nice to have a Hollywood studio come to us to remix something of theirs, and hopefully this’ll help open up the scene.

It wasn’t until 1998 though that we were able to first fuse the disciplines of both VJing and television and actually produce something close to our then dream format of a show that viewers would watch in much the same way as listening to music. Transambient was produced for the UK’s Channel 4, it was simply ambient television on acid. No presenters, no idents, no captions, just visuals and music, the like of which had never really been seen on TV before. The project consisted of original music, specially shot footage and audiovisually remixed archive material.

We soon followed in 2001 with another television and DVD project, Spaced Out, audiovisually remixing NASA archives, working with artists like Coldcut and Brian Kane, one of our heroes from EBN. What came next was a huge surprise; getting commissioned by the UKs biggest commercial network (not famed for its artistic credentials) to make a show that brought together audio and video artists, VJs and DJs from all over the world together into the sprawling audiovisual project Mixmasters that we produced over the next four years. We’re also now seeing encouraging signs from other broadcasters like the BBC, who are opening up their archives under a modified Creative Commons licence, and we’ve suggested adding a framework that would enable AV remixers the same ability to (relatively) easily clear samples as now exists in the music world, and there are signs this may eventually happen.

Our vision has always remained the same over the last decade, but we’ve sampled and remixed our artistic practice to fashion a creative framework which means we can express ourselves in lots of ways. In addition to performing at arts and music festivals and clubs around the world, with both live cinema projects and audiovisual club sets, we take on commercial remixing and producing work and also get asked to test new AV performance equipment for manufacturers like Pioneer, Roland and Korg. In 2003, we were the first to have Pioneer’s revolutionary DVD turntables, putting them through their paces at gigs and now we’re helping develop other new stuff with them, which is good as it means we can put a performer’s viewpoint forward early on. And in 2005 we ran a big audiovisual festival called Optronica in London at the UK’s National Film Theatre and Britain’s biggest IMAX cinema, simply because we wanted to do a bespoke event on a grand scale for audiovisual acts.

So although it’s not always been a widely explored or understood field, hopefully all this points to the audiovisual genre opening up for everyone over the next few years, audiences and artists alike, and then hopefully we’ll always be able to give the short answer, not the long one.