Psychic Armchair TV

This installation by Saskatoon based VJ Carrie Gates came up on my Facebook homepage today. It defies the passive consumption of imagery, something all to often done by spectators of VJ work and by VJs themselves—especially when they use pop culture and nostalgia for the sake of ease (something we too have been guilty of!).

From the official write up: "This work is an installation where EEG brainwave signals are used as biofeedback controllers for a video mixer built in Max/MSP/Jitter software. The participant is seated on a comfortable seat in an intimate environment, facing a television set. The Gallery Assistant fits the participant with the EEG sensor headband, which then reads their changing brainwaves and sends that data as integers over a wireless Bluetooth connection to the hidden laptop computer, controlling the aspects of the video playback system. When the participant’s brain waves change, the video changes in realtime, creating a biofeedback loop. The trick for participants is to learn how to train their brainwaves to respond to the graphic imagery seen on the screen in order to see all of the videos. One has to control the mind's reaction to the imagery on different levels in order to see it all and control the organic sequence of videos. The videos revolve around themes of consumption, war, greed, glamour, environmental damage, and other perils of contemporary late capitalist culture, investigating relationships of passive consumption in gallery-based new media art and the world at large."

Not only is this impressive technically and conceptually, but I am delighted by the very fact that it is conceptual at all. Maybe I'm paranoid (or ignorant), but I often sense that there is too wide a divide between the work of VJs and the new media artists with whom they share video technology. VJ work doesn't have to be superficial, and new media art can and should be incorporated into nightlife. I'm not saying that the lines are necessarily firmly drawn, only that further integration and goodwill between the two is a great thing.