Electronic Music from Germany – Current trends

When the Visual Jockey (VJ) became established as the visual counterpart to the DJ in clubs around 15 years ago, Berlin’s specific club culture offered the ideal backdrop for image creators who were keen to experiment.

Clubs such as the WMF installed permanent VJ desks, a club night without visual accompaniment to the music seemed almost unthinkable any more. But what does the VJ scene in Berlin look like today now that many clubs have long since unscrewed their video projectors and cut VJs out of the budget?

VJing in the form of club visuals that visually complement a whole club night has become a more marginal phenomenon in Berlin, as opposed to Munich for instance. Yet it can be seen that VJing in a broader sense as a visual performance in real time, which is not stringently tied to the club and the format of the club night in the sense of either space or time, definitely does represent a lively forum of experimentation.

Historicisation of club visuals

It was certainly at least partly this development of VJing that transcends the club context which has led to the first larger-scale historicisation of Berlin club visuals: the exhibition Screendancing - A Retrospective of Berlin Club Visuals was held in the Berlin venue .HBC in 2010, at which curators Klaus Kotai and Torsten Oetken presented video clips from 1999 to 2003, as well as recent live performances by Berlin club visual pioneers including Visomat inc., Lillevan, Pfadfinderei or Jutojo.

The trend mentioned above is already becoming apparent from the development of the pioneers who took part, because very few of them still work as club VJs. Their visual activities have shifted into other areas, albeit frequently related ones. For instance Pfadfinderei developed a live audio-visual performance with Moderat in 2009. Lillevan has appeared in live audio-visual performances with the musician Fennesz, but has also departed from the field of electronic (club) music in the New Music direction, for instance in collaboration with composer Olga Neuwirth.

The scene now

The current VJ scene in Berlin may be happening in a club environment less conducive to experimentation than the pioneers in the 1990s, but for all that it can utilise an existing network of international connections and festivals, which in turn has an impact on local activities. As a result, productions by the younger generations are influenced just as much by VJing opening up into concert-type audio-visual formats, different venues and musical directions. The club in turn is increasingly becoming a place for visual installations and performance presentations, in which the visuals are either complemented or even replaced by performing people, as is the case with Bella Berlin’s dance performance as a human disco ball.

The central starting point of the scene is the VisualBerlin society, founded in 2005. It can be seen as a hub for the global AVIT network, but its base is definitely in Neukölln, where there are regular society evenings that provide a framework for direct communication about aesthetic and technical issues. Beyond that, the society organises and initiates workshops and projects such as the VisualBerlin Festival in June 2010. However VisualBerlin does not just invite people to Berlin, its international networking is also represented by members. For instance Auderoselavy and Raquel Meyers belong to the Homemade collective, which is primarily active between Paris and Berlin, while Ilan Katin forms a connection between the VJ software Modul8 and the Mapping Festival in Geneva.

Theory and practice

The orientation of VJing to different presentation formats also goes hand-in-hand with a theoretical discussion on the subject of VJing and related phenomena such as visual music or live cinema, although these phenomena only happen to a limited extent within the usual academic structure of higher education.

The theoretical debate is conducted as a lively exchange between theory and practice, not least because the proponents of theory are also active in an artistic capacity, for example Mia Makela, who is a major advocate of the concept of live cinema as a real-time audio-visual performance. Elena Romakin has incorporated the combination of theoretical lecture and live performance straight into the programme for her project Laika, although this combination has also been practised for years at festivals such as the Club Transmediale. So Berlin is not only proving itself an active hub for developments originating from VJing, it also offers a forum for its discursive contextualisation.