Visual Music Archive

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Visual Kitchen 

started in the late nineties as a collective that focused on live video mixing and pioneered the Belgian VJ-scene. They explore the semantics of live AV performance and video art from a background of VJing and music video production.

In the early days the main activities aimed for the dance floor, with a residency at the Brussels' Cybertheatre, collaborations with mayor Belgian dance-events (10daysOff, I Love Techno, Groovecity) and a long track record of underground performances (RephlexNight, Seats'nBeats).

 

An artist in residency-status at Concertgebouw in Bruges in 2003 were a turning point in the artistic approach. With interpretations of the Karlheinz Stockhausen piece Pole für 2 for dual MX50 with feedback or the visual adaptation of the original audiotape that accompanied the Laborintus II opera by Luciano Berio, they set themselves a new standard. The collaborations with Eavesdropper, also resident, continued and intensified resulting in several forms of collaborations such as the Massive Central collective or the Locker03 DVD/installation.

 

In 2003 Visual Kitchen joined forces with Les P’tits Belges in the organization of the annual Cimatics AV festivals. The Cimatics Platform offers a wide spectrum of activities within the fields of VJing and live audiovisual performances, with the festival as the key focus point. In 2007 they restructured these activities, (re)organizing the AV and VJ scene with the Cimatics\AV\platform that produces, promotes and distributes national and international audiovisual artists, while Visual Kitchen focuses on the intrinsically artistic productions by the founding artists Jurgen Van Gemert and Sam Vanoverschelde.

 

Source: Visual Kitchen's website

 

 

Visual Kitchen, choreography, punk, partitur

Reading

VJ: Audio-Visual Art + VJ Culture (2006) edited by D-Fuse. A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term denoted the presenter who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and in sync to music, whether at dance clubs and raves or art galleries and festivals. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this dynamic audio-visual experience. (Laurence King Publishing)

‘vE-”jA: Art + Technology of Live Audio-Video (2006) by Xarene Eskander is a global snapshot of an exploding genre of tech-art performance: VJing and live audio-video. The book covers 40 international artists with 400+ colour images and 50+ movies and clips on an accompanying DVD and web downloads. (VJ Book)

Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media (2009) by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (Eds.) is divided into two sections: the first deals with the academic discussion on the subject of visual music; the second introduces contemporary paradigms of audio-visual praxis in brief presentations and contextualises them. Apart from being a guide in the historical sense, this new volume provides theoretical approaches to understanding and making visual music. (Fluctuating Images)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Zürich Chamber Orchestra ZKO: Rollercoaster (2008) by Euro RSCG Group Switzerland, Zürich and produced by Virtual Republic. Visualization of the 1st violin of the 2nd symphony, 4th movement by Ferdinand Ries in the shape of a rollercoaster. The camera starts by showing a close-up of the score, then focuses on the notes of the first violin turning the staves into the winding rail tracks of the rollercoaster. The notes and bars were exactly synchronised with the progression in the animation so that the typical movements of a rollercoaster ride match the dramatic composition of the music. (Virtual Republic on Vimeo)

Karl Kliem (*1969) studied at the well-known Hochschule für Gestaltung (University of Art and Design) in Offenbach. He developed real-time audio and visual systems and has designed the most diverse projects in the fields of multi-media, web design, and TV design, as well as music and audio production for films and interactive installations. Karl Kliem is a founding member of Involving-Systems (1994) and MESO (1997). (Dienststelle)

Ólafur Arnalds: Ljósið (2009) by Argentinian motion graphic artist Esteban Diácono is the official music video for the track Ljósið taken from Ólafur Arnalds' album Found Songs. (Esteban Diácono on Vimeo)

Kandinsky (2009) edited by Tracey Bashkof is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist's career to be exhibited in the United States since 1985, when the Guggenheim culminated its trio of groundbreaking exhibitions of the artist's life and work in Munich, Russia, and Paris. This presentation of nearly 100 paintings brings together works from the three institutions that have the greatest concentration of Kandinsky's work in the world, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; as well as significant loans from private and public holdings. (Guggenheim)

Christian Ernest Marclay (*1955) is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Christian Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument. (Wikipedia)