Addictive TV: Audiovisual Pleasures

The press never tires of showering them with sweet compliments, fans declare their endless love, Hollywood companies keep handing over their best films to be torn apart by them, and musicians and DJs queue up to secure them for their shows.

Shoot Em Up - Addictive TV remix

Take the Lead - Addictive TV remix

Tolly: As performers, we usually say that we're audiovisual (AV) artists and producers — something like that. We travel the world with our shows, from Brazil to Russia, playing everywhere from clubs and festivals to cinemas and museums (if we're asked to do live projects as opposed to our usual audiovisual club sets).

Graham: As producers we work with other artists, produce various kinds of shows for television, release DVDs and, besides that, organise events such as our The Audiovisual Lounge parties, which have been running in London for many years now. Another example is, of course, our visual-music festival Optronica, which we launched in London together with the British Film Institute.

Graham: Simply put, it's a show, a kind of performance in which the visual aspect is just as important as the music. In cinema and on television, music heightens the perception of the image. Whereas in AV, it's the image that underscores the music, heightens its impact. For us, joining these two components — or the chance to see-hear the connection between them — is a very important thing. On the whole, AV is the natural progression of remix culture, which applies both to music and to work with visual imagery. Many people still perceive sampling only in relation to sound, but they aren't aware of what's actually happening now in this respect.

Tolly: Visual imagery can have an incredibly powerful effect and is capable of bringing a great deal to a given piece of music. We all have eyes, just as we have ears; and as an extension of sound, video can generate an astonishing audience reaction that music alone could not create. Visual imagery expands the space around the music.

Graham: This word once popped into my head when I was trying to explain to myself what we do, and in my musings I arrived at the phrase "optical electronica" — and simply shortened it to "Optronica". Simply put, Optronica is a festival of visual art, five days during which the organic interaction of music and video art reigns supreme. On top of that, we help those artists who find it hard to break into the line-ups invited to other similar festivals.

Graham: EBN are absolute pioneers of audiovisual sampling. Brian Kane and Gardner Post mixed classic EBN material with new works made specially for the Optronica festival. And Peter Greenaway is now presenting his VJ project Tulse Luper (a blend of avant-garde cinematic episodes from his film with DJ remixes).

Graham: It's wonderful that a film director like Peter Greenaway has turned his attention to the world of VJing. It's already more than obvious that the visualisation of music can be called the first true movement of the 21st century!

Graham: We had fantastic press conferences. For instance, in the discussions the central message from Peter Greenaway boiled down to the phrase "the death of cinema". On top of that, we had the guys from the film archive Centre for Visual Music, who have been collecting their material for decades! Thanks to them, ultra-rare material from the 1930s–60s was screened. Also this year at the festival we had a talk with a well-known professor on the subject of sound-colour synaesthesia (a perceptual phenomenon in which every sound can be represented by a shade of a particular colour). And there was also a live performance by the talented Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa.

Tolly: You forgot to mention the ReacTable installation from Barcelona. It's an amazing tactile synthesiser, a quirky game of chess that creates futuristic sounds the moment the players start moving the chess pieces. In just two days their recent demo on YouTube was downloaded more than half a million times!

Reactable: basic demo #1

Graham: It's very gratifying that the scene is now growing faster than it was two years ago, so more and more artists are joining this movement. And it's wonderful that such giant manufacturers as Pioneer, Roland and Numark have finally started producing professional equipment for the audiovisual scene. We're involved in the industry's development — for example, Pioneer's DVJ and Roland/Edirol's CG-8 video synthesiser. The growth of the scene is also marked by the emergence of ever more projects like our Optronica festival. And this is happening all over the world — and that, without doubt, is good news.

Graham: A club space should be filled not only with a good sound system but also with decent video equipment. In cinemas and arts centres there should be more live shows. But, of course, before any innovations of this kind are introduced, more worthy artists need to appear! I'm not talking about DJs who ask VJs to mix visual imagery for a DVD set. I mean brilliant AV artists who join audio and video into one: people who create both the musical and the visual elements at the same time!

Written by Chiemi