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      <p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><b><font size="3">The 
        History of VJ</font></b></font></p>
      <p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">by 
        Michael Heap</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">1965:- San Fransisco: 
        Kesey Bus<br>
        First of Ken Kesey &amp; the Prankster&#146;s Acid tests, Described as 
        an un-scripted Spontaneous Multimedia happening<br>
        Grateful Dead House Band, Be In style freeform party with projections 
        from Kesey &amp; Pranksters exploitation&#146;s on their Bus &#145;further&#146; 
        </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br>
        1966:- New York: Andy Warhol &amp; Exploding plastic inevitable.<br>
        Focus around the development of several Club nights in New York, the first 
        &#145;Andy wharhol uptight&#146;<br>
        &quot;If you had been in New York City in February 1966, you might have 
        been one of a thousand people who received a flyer in the mail advertising 
        'Andy Warhol Up-Tight' at the Film-Makers Cinematheque on West 41st Street... 
        a combination of films by Andy Warhol, lights by Danny Williams, music 
        by The Velvet Underground and Nico, dancing by Gerard Malanga and Edie 
        Sedgwick, slides and film projections by Paul Morrissey and Warhol, photographs 
        by Billy Linich and by Nat Finkelstein... movie cameras by Barbara Rubin... 
        Donald Lyons and Bob Neuwirth (Dylan's roadie and confidant), listed in 
        the ad, came as Edie's escorts...<br>
        The show began with a film called 'Lupe' starring Edie Sedgwick... After 
        two 35 minute reels of 'Lupe', The Velvet Underground and Nico walked 
        onto the stage in front of the movie screen and began to tune up in the 
        dark. Andy, who was working one movie projector, now trained a silent 
        version of 'Vinyl', his interpretation of 'A Clockwork Orange' starring 
        Gerard Malanga as a juvenile delinquent, on the screen. Superimposed on 
        this by another movie projector run by Paul Morrissey were close-up shots 
        of Nico singing 'I'll Keep It With Mine' by Bob Dylan... Then as The Velvet 
        Underground went into 'Venus In Furs', Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick 
        moved to centre stage and began gyrating in a free form dance pattern. 
        The whole ensemble was now playing in front of two movies 'Vinyl' and 
        'The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound' being shown silently 
        next to each other...Lou began to sing 'Heroin'. Gerard slowly unwound, 
        came to rest on the floor of the stage, and proceeded to light a candle 
        and, in a kneeling position, slightly bent over, undid his belt. He pulled 
        a spoon from his back pocket, rolled up his sleeve, heated the spoon over 
        the flame of the candle, touched the spoon with what appeared to be a 
        hypodermic needle (actually a lead pencil), wrapped the belt around his 
        arm tightly, and began to flex his arm in a sweeping up-and-down motion. 
        Then he pressed the 'needle' into his arm, slowly rose and began to whirl 
        frantically around the stage.&quot;<br>
        Warhol and Paul Morrissey had originally intended to have The Velvets 
        play at a nightclub that Broadway producer Michael Myerberg was opening. 
        Myerberg had met with Warhol and Morrissey at Sardis and offered to pay 
        Warhol to hang out there with people like Edie Sedgwick to generate publicity 
        for the club. According to an account by Paul Morrissey, it was Morrissey 
        who suggested that rather than just getting paid to sit there, they should 
        present a group that Warhol managed a la Brian Epstein. Myerberg agreed, 
        but Warhol did not yet have a band to present. It was then that they started 
        looking for a band and 'discovered' the Velvet Underground when Gerard 
        Malanga took Warhol and Morrissey to see them at the Cafe Bizarre in December 
        1965. Warhol suggested calling Myerberg's club, 'Andy Warhol's Up'.<br>
        However, as time passed, other people became involved with the disco and 
        Myerberg's influence over the project decreased. His interest had also 
        waned after seeing the 'Andy Warhol, Up-Tight' show at the Cinematheque 
        during the second week of February. Eventually, about a week before they 
        were supposed to open, Morrissey was informed that the people behind the 
        club had decided to open it with The Young Rascals instead of The Velvet 
        Underground.<br>
        After Morrissey found out about the club's decision, he went down to the 
        Cafe Figaro in Greenwich Village where Warhol had gone with Gerard Malanga 
        It was while he was telling Andy what happened that their conversation 
        was overheard by Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern who were sitting at the 
        table behind them and told them about the Dom:<br>
        The Dom had been a Polish dance hall called Stanley&#146;s the Dom (Polsky 
        Dom Narodny - the word &quot;Dom&quot; being Polish for home). The two 
        people who had rented it from the owners did &quot;sculpture with light&quot; 
        but were not ready to use the space until May. So Andy rented it during 
        April to present the Plastic Inevitable. Entry was $6 and it was a success, 
        making $18,000 in the first week.<br>
        Sterling Morrison: &quot;But our actual salary from Paul Morrissey, who 
        handled the business side for Andy, was five dollars a day, for cheese 
        or beer at the Blarney Stone. He had a ledger that listed everything, 
        including drug purchases - $5 for heroin. When the accountant saw it, 
        he said 'What the hell is this?':&quot; <br>
        According to Gerard Malanga and Victor Bockris, all the people contributing 
        to the show were paid the same amount - Lou Reed got the same for playing 
        as Gerard did for dancing or Danny Williams for doing the lights: &quot;On 
        an average night at the Dom they would be paid a hundred dollars apiece&quot;. 
        <br>
        During the first week that the Dom was open, it took in $18,000.00.<br>
        While performing at the Dom, Lou Reed's Gretch guitar and record collection 
        was stolen.<br>
        DANNY WILLIAMS who did the lights/sound for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable 
        would later mysteriously disappear in 1967 &quot;off the coast of Cape 
        Cod leaving his clothes by the side of his car.&quot; Although his body 
        was never found, it is presumed to be a suicide. <br>
        Sterling Morrison: &quot;It was at this time that The Velvets started 
        wearing dark glasses on stage, not through trying to be cool but because 
        the light-show could be blinding at times.&quot; <br>
        At the same time that the VELVETS were playing at the Dom, Andy&#146;s 
        film, MY HUSTLER was playing uptown at the Film-Makers&#146; Co-op and 
        Warhol's silver helium-filled pillows and yellow and pink cow wallpaper 
        was being shown at the Castelli Gallery. <br>
        The final performance of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom took 
        place on April 30, 1966.<br>
        It then went on tour Across the US.</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">1969: Nam June Piak 
        &amp; Vietnam &amp; PortaPak &lt;no video&gt;<br>
        Paik is famed for having said &quot;Television has been attacking us all 
        our lives, now we can attack it back&quot;. <br>
        Paik&#146;s statement should not be interpreted only on one level: he 
        was not proposing that video art would destroy, replace or simply be an 
        alternative to television. As became apparent with later projects such 
        as Good Morning Mr. Orwell in 1984, Paik and many other artists were also 
        deeply interested in occupying the broadcast space of television as an 
        expanded arena for art.<br>
        Nam June Paik appears again in this history of appropriation, as purportedly 
        the first artist to acquire and use a video portapak as a tool of artistic 
        expression. The portapak was developed by Sony as a lightweight portable 
        recording device for use in air-to-ground surveillance during the Vietnam 
        war. It was only as the war drew to a close that the electronics industry 
        realised that they had a product to sell on the open market. Since the 
        launch of that crude, low resolution black and white recording system 
        as the world&#146;s first home video format in 1969, the video camera 
        has become one of the most widespread consumer tools since Kodak launched 
        the amateur camera.<br>
        The history of video art, particularly from the early seventies until 
        the mid nineties, is also the history of workshops, co-operatives, pressure 
        groups and activist organisations whose aim was to provide access to the 
        means of electronic communication and to propose an alternative to the 
        dominant forms of communication and culture practised by broadcasting 
        corporations and mainstream art institutions. During this period in North 
        America and most European countries, artists, media activists and community-based 
        political groups organised themselves around idealistic, collectively 
        run and usually open-access workshops or labs where the expensive tools 
        of media production could be made available at reasonable prices to individuals 
        and groups lacking the budgets required for commercial production. The 
        legacy of this &quot;movement&quot; can still be seen today in the many 
        medialabs that have now very often shifted their focus to the internet 
        and digital communications. </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br>
        1970&#146;s Video art progression, Stadium Rock &amp; birth of spectacle<br>
        Late 70&#146;s Birth of hip-hop</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br>
        1983 Herbie Hancock :- Rokit/Rockit video - Godley &amp; Cr&egrave;me<br>
        &lt; VIDEO :ROCKIT&gt;<br>
        Question: What do a critic's poll-topping band from the 1970's, the video 
        for &quot;Every Breath You Take&quot; by The Police, a guitar attachment 
        called The Gizmo, a Nissan Hardbody truck commercial, an illustrated memoir 
        titled &quot;The Fun Starts Here,&quot; a new video label and an upcoming 
        feature film called &quot;Howling At The Moon&quot; have in common? <br>
        Godley and Cr&egrave;me: originally part of 10cc This is the British duo 
        that brought to the screen such delights as Duran Duran's &quot;Girls 
        on Film&quot;; &quot;Every Breath You Take&quot; and &quot;Wrapped Around 
        Your Finger&quot; for The Police; &quot;Rockit&quot; and &quot;Autodrive&quot; 
        for Herbie Hancock; &quot;Victims&quot; for Boy George and Culture Club; 
        &quot;Two Tribes&quot; and &quot;The Power of Love&quot; for Frankie Goes 
        to Hollywood; and &quot;Don't Give Up&quot; for Peter Gabriel and Kate 
        Bush. <br>
        But music video is but the most recent medium they've mastered. As half 
        of the British pop quartet 10cc, they had a six-year string of hits, and 
        they're about to release their seventh LP as a duo, Goodbye Blue Sky, 
        their first since The History Mix, Vol. 1, in 1985. In the meantime, they've 
        written and/or illustrated a variety of books; created and produced television 
        advertising (Wrangler Jeans, Lincoln-Mercury, New York and Boston Yellow 
        Pages); invented, manufactured and marketed guitar electronics (the Gizmo); 
        as well as directed an eye-opening array of creative endeavours which 
        never quite made it to market . <br>
        Their first single off 10cc, &quot;Donna&quot; - a clever doo-wop parody 
        - reached number two in the U.K., and the second, &quot;Rubber Bullets,&quot; 
        hit number one in July '73. &quot;The Dean and I,&quot; the debut's third 
        single, also went top ten. In America, Cashbox magazine voted them &quot;The 
        Best New Group of 1973.&quot;<br>
        Although on their first video, it was one of the first commercially released 
        showing scratch video techniques. Its possibly the weirdest music video 
        ever released.</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">1985: May: Paul Hardcastle 
        19 &lt;Video: 19&gt;<br>
        Paul Hardcastle<br>
        Paul's first major release was on Chrysalis and he decided to try a different 
        approach. Staying true to the dance floor genre that had got him this 
        far, he perfected a dramatic, arresting semi-instrumental composition 
        based on something he'd heard about the average age of combat soldiers 
        in the Vietnam War. The production values of the resulting track have 
        given &quot;19&quot; a place in the all-time dance music winners enclosure.<br>
        By the time the single became commercially available at the end of April 
        1985, the buzz about &quot;19&quot; was deafening. The song crash-landed 
        on the British chart at #4. The next week saw &quot;19&quot; at the #1 
        spot, where it stayed for a solid five weeks. In Holland it stayed put 
        at the #1 spot nationally for 16 weeks solid, proving not only Paul's 
        staying power, but also his international appeal.<br>
        &quot;It sold 4 million copies around the world,&quot; Paul recalls. &quot;I 
        remember it sold 65,000 copies here in the UK on the day it went to number 
        one. It was great, because it went to #1 in 13 different countries and 
        it's one of the records I still hear on the radio and I feel proud. I 
        feel proud because I received the IVOR NOVELLO award for the best selling 
        single of 1985.&quot;<br>
        </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">1985: June The motorcade 
        sped on: Steinski &lt;VIDEO&gt;<br>
        Also around the same period, journalist &#145;Steinski&#146; (of the highly 
        influential &quot;Double Dee and Steinski&quot;) created the song The 
        Motorcade Sped On which was a cut-up collage of the live news reports 
        surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Aside from the brilliant use samples, 
        what is truly revolutionary about this song is that it was composed as 
        an audiovisual piece using TV footage as A/V samples. The actual news 
        footage &#150; both audio and video &#150; of Kennedy&#146;s murder was 
        cut-up and re-edited into a piece in which, once you&#146;ve seen and 
        understood the piece, the audio cannot be separated from the video<br>
        </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">1985: Late Duvet bros. 
        &amp; scratch Video &lt;VIDEO&gt;<br>
        The independent media movement had a major international impact on the 
        growth of video and subsequent forms of electronic art. At the aesthetic 
        level, the most profound tendency to emerge from this field was represented 
        by Scratch Video, a form with close links to sampling in music and with 
        its historical roots in political photomontage and avant garde film. As 
        a form, scratch had a wide appeal, and was taken up variously by visual 
        artists, political activists, music video producers, advertisers and film 
        directors. Paik again is to be mentioned in this context &#150; the constant 
        re-use and re-cutting of both original and found imagery in rapid-fire 
        electronic montages of sound and image is characteristic for his work. 
        Drawing on the history of avant garde film &#150; particularly the abstract 
        film language of artists such as Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and Oskar 
        Fischinger, or the cut-up films of Bruce Connor, Paik elaborates a visual 
        language of video that links him to Warhol in terms of both his impact 
        on contemporary art and his attitude to the use of imagery from mass media. 
        A key point in the development of scratch or appropriated video is in 
        the late 1970&#146;s when American artist Dara Birnbaum made her series 
        of short works Pop Pop Video, the most memorable of these being Technological 
        Transformation: Wonder Woman. This brief &#150; and for the time &#150; 
        rapidly edited montage of images from the popular tv series Wonder Woman 
        welded the irreverent aesthetics of punk to a formal avant garde tradition 
        and the so called &quot;drastic classicism&quot; of New York&#146;s post-minimalist 
        new music milieu, typified by the noise barrage of composers like Rhys 
        Chatham and Glen Branca. Birnbaum worked directly with musicians from 
        that milieu, along with other emerging video artists like John Sanborn, 
        Kit Fitzgerald and Mary Perillo, who had close ties with The Kitchen Centre 
        for Video, Dance and New Music.</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Thus in the early 
        eighties Scratch Video quickly became a widespread form that broke with 
        earlier, durational, performative and minimalistic forms of video art. 
        In London at the Brixton night club The Fridge, a group of young artists 
        including George Barber, The Duvet Brothers, Sandra Goldbacher and Kim 
        Flitcroft arranged weekly screenings, showing their re-cut versions of 
        tv commercials and hollywood films on a heap of old tv sets bound together 
        with heavy steel chains. The images would often be accompanied by music 
        that existed at the point of transition between post-punk new wave, American 
        hip hop, techno and Jamaican dub. At the same time in New York clubs like 
        Manmhattan&#146;s Danceteria were home to a milieu of young video artists 
        who wanted to develop and expose their work in a social context outside 
        of the mainstream gallery world. As a style, Scratch spread rapidly across 
        Europe, North America and in Japan, and in many of these places it acquired 
        a sharp political edge when it became a tool in the hands of media activists 
        who instinctively understood that its deconstructive techniques could 
        be applied to political campaigning. In Britain, groups like Gorilla Tapes 
        and The Duvet Brothers achieved wide exposure, including extensive tv 
        broadcasting. The visual language they used quickly passed over into the 
        vocabulary of television, particularly in the case of youth programming, 
        music video and advertising. Other artists including George Barber, the 
        German Ingo G&uuml;nther, and former experimental film makers such as 
        David Larcher, contributed to the development of a complex language of 
        electronic images which directly impacted upon the emerging disciplines 
        of communication design and video graphics. At a point in the mid eighties, 
        London was the undisputed world centre for video graphics, and many video 
        artists found themselves working in high technology studios for high budget 
        clients. In the USA, the heritage of Scratch as a political tool for activism 
        and cultural terrorism was reconfigured in the late eighties and nineties 
        by artists such as Paul Garrin, a former assistant of Nam June Paik, and 
        the group Emergency Broadcast Network who developed an early form of &quot;culture 
        jamming&quot;. Subsequently, groups like Negativland, The Barbie Liberation 
        Front, RtMark and numerous others have taken the project further both 
        in electronic media and real-world actions or interventions.<br>
        late 1980&#146;s:<br>
        </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Max Headroom &lt;MAXHEADROOM&gt;<br>
        The time is &quot;20 minutes into the future&quot; and all over the city 
        TV screens are going blank. <br>
        Since this city is both entirely dependent upon and totally dominated 
        by television, panic sets in: people are even raiding each other's homes 
        for old video recordings. Enter Edison Carter, ace investigative reporter 
        for Network 23. Carter quickly discovers who is sabotaging the TV transmissions. 
        It's the &quot;Blanks,&quot; a band of terroristic urban outcasts who 
        have used their computer skills to wipe themselves off all official records. 
        Now the Blanks are trying to pull the city's plug. Whom to turn to? Why, 
        Max Headroom, of course, Carter's computer-generated alter ego. To penetrate 
        the Blank's headquarters, Max is transformed into a &quot;self-contained 
        ROM construct with an isometric optical microlink.&quot;... At last the 
        TV image of Max confronts the leader of the Blanks in his electronic lair. 
        But before they can cross disc drives, Max can't resist doing his Bogart. 
        &quot;Of all the computers in all the systems in all the world,&quot; 
        he sighs, &quot;I had to walk into yours.&quot; <br>
        The series also calls to mind some of MTV's farthest-out videos like Peter 
        Gabriel's &quot;Sledgehammer,&quot; with its free-floating animations, 
        and Prince's &quot;Raspberry Beret,&quot; in which the singer seems to 
        have been sliced and diced by a berserk computer. Yet, in effect, &quot;Max 
        Headroom&quot; has carried the MTV revolution into another dimension. 
        Indeed, a rock-video freak dialing from &quot;Max&quot; to MTV might conclude 
        that the latter suddenly appears downright stodgy. <br>
        Perhaps that's because this series has fused its avant-garde pyrotechnics 
        onto a genuine, and sustained, story line, then enriched the blend with 
        whiz-bang pacing and slyly understated acting. The early ratings were 
        mixed: millions of &quot;Headroom&quot; cultists gave the show respectable 
        numbers for a highly experimental new series, yet it was equally clear 
        that millions more literally tuned out with a kind of what-the-heck-is-this 
        reaction. Still, even if the show fails to survive, bits and pieces of 
        its ingenuity are virtually certain to filter into the rest of prime time.<br>
        Self-exposure: Yet &quot;Max&quot; may end up changing more than just 
        how network television looks to viewers. This thoroughly subversive video 
        parody could revise how network TV looks upon itself. &quot;The deliciousness 
        of the show,&quot; muses executive producer Peter Wagg, &quot;is that 
        a network is allowing us to show how the system works, how ratings are 
        important, why Americans are given the same old material.&quot; <br>
        It seems no accident that this breakthrough comedy team is almost exclusively 
        British. &quot;American TV largely turns out predigested bunk, says &quot;Max&quot; 
        writer Steve Roberts. &quot;That's a guarantee of failure. But if someone 
        twinkles TV's knobs, people will queue up to watch. 'Max' is challenging 
        because it looks at the world in unorthodox ways. Europeans poke fun at 
        their institutions as second nature, but that's not a habit here. You 
        respect authority in a real way. You criticise and doubt it, but you don't 
        mock it like Dickens and Monty Python.&quot; <br>
        Begin playback in London, 1982: Peter Wagg, then a 33-year-old record-company 
        executive, is putting together an MTV-style music-video series for Britian's 
        trendy Channel 4. Since he hopes to market the show abroad, Wagg hits 
        upon the notion of hosting it with a computerized creature who would appeal 
        to techno-freaks of all nations. Wagg turns to George Stone, an advertising 
        copywriter, and Rocky Morton and Annabelle Jankel, a pair of ingenious 
        computer-graphic animators. Together the three hatch Max.<br>
        To play their creation's human template (Max is actually a flesh-and-blood 
        actor whose image has been manipulated by electronic trickery), Wagg settles 
        on Canada's Matt Frewer, who, with his blandly handsome visage and mid-Atlantic 
        accent, seems ideally exportable. Frewer decides to model Max's personality 
        after the smarmy, self-important goofiness of &quot;The Mary Tyler Moore 
        Show's&quot; Ted Baxter. &quot;I particularly wanted to get that phony 
        bonhomie of Baxter,&quot; recalls the actor. &quot;Max always assumes 
        a decadelong friendship on the first meeting. At first sight he'll ask 
        about that blackhead on your nose.&quot;<br>
        Wagg has forbidden Frewer to discuss precisely how he's transformed into 
        Headroom for fear of diminishing Max's mystique. (&quot;If we tell you 
        how to do it from A to Z,&quot; says the actor, &quot;anybody could make 
        Max. Add one egg, oregano, and you have Headroom Alfonso.&quot;) Despite 
        such understandable reticence, this much can be disclosed. During a two-hour 
        makeup session, Frewer dons a latex mask, shocking-blue contact lenses, 
        a yellow, rubberized wig and a fibre-glass suit. His image is then processed 
        through a kind of computer-graphic Cuisinart that electronically alters 
        his features. Max's jerky vocal inflections are the product of a voice 
        synthesizer. <br>
        The series' first episode opens with Max introducing a weird German video 
        with an equally-weird, fractured-German sentence. &quot;Everybody was 
        scared stiff, &quot; recalls Wagg of the premiere. But within a month 
        more than a million viewers are turning in, nearly doubling Channel 4's 
        ratings for the time slot. To maximize his star's appeal, Wagg begins 
        cutting back on the music and bringing on such celebrity guests as Boy 
        George, Simon LeBon and Jack Lemmon. By the eighth episode, Max has made 
        his first public appearance--opening a furniture store in Belfast. From 
        then on, says Wagg, &quot;he was unstoppable.&quot; <br>
        Fast-forward to the States: The Cinemax pay-cable service, which has helped 
        finance Max's launch in Britian, unleashes his series on the American 
        audience. By now Max's ego--inflated, no doubt, by his worshipful press 
        reviews--is roughly the size of a satellite dish, while his attention 
        span has shrunk to microsecond dimensions. In short, he's become the perfect 
        talk-show host. His run on Cinemax is rife with indelicate moments: Max 
        introducing hair stylist Vidal Sassoon as &quot;V.D. Sassoon&quot;; Max 
        listening to Sting go on about his &quot;art&quot; and suddenly breaking 
        into an exaggerated yawn; Max greeting Michael Caine by saying, &quot;OK, 
        Michael, fire away ... What have you always wanted to ask me?&quot; The 
        show instantly enraptures young viewers. Max, after all, speaks their 
        language: computer literate, media-wise and gleefully disrespectful. In 
        shopping malls and homerooms, the coolest kids suddenly discover a new 
        way to convulse each other. They begn t-t-talking like th-th-this. <br>
        Insert new cassette, courtesy of Coke: The ever-ambitious Wagg realizes 
        that he still needs something to give the &quot;Maxhead&quot; cult a mass 
        spin. The Coca-Cola Co., meanwhile, is looking for a way to get the message 
        about its New Coke to the teenagers they created it for. It's a marriage 
        made in promotional heaven, the first real occasion in which a commercial 
        spokesperson for a major corporation becomes a national celebrity as a 
        result of his commercial performances. <br>
        Max's &quot;C-C-Catch the wave&quot; spots for Coke, two of which were 
        directed by Ridley Scott, may be the most cleverly constructed pitches 
        ever aimed at the under-30 viewer.</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">EBN &lt;LSD&gt;<br>
        Emergency Broadcast Network<br>
        Emergency Broadcast Network (E.B.N.) was born, creating an art form borne 
        from the convergence of media and music. These were the heady days of 
        the Persian Gulf War, and E.B.N.&#146;s core team &#150; Joshua L. Pearson, 
        Gardner H. Post, Ronald O'Donnell, and consultant Brian Kane &#150; seized 
        the opportunity to reinterpret the media frenzy of the war, creating counter-psy-ops 
        programming in the guise of music videos. <br>
        Owing as much to the experimental art of Duchamp and Dadaism as to new 
        advances in technology, the results paved the way for the underground 
        media revolution, with E.B.N. as its forefathers. The group solidified 
        its team with the addition of famed software designer and musician Greg 
        Deocampo (creator of AfterEffects), and set about perfecting its approach 
        to reprocessing media noise. <br>
        E.B.N.&#146;s visibility skyrocketed when Irish rockers U2 asked to use 
        the cut &quot;We Will Rock You&quot; to open its Zoo TV tour. Soon after, 
        TVT Records signed the group and released the VHS tape &quot;Commercial 
        Entertainment Product&quot; in 1992, and the enhanced CD &quot;Telecommunication 
        Breakdown&quot; in 1995. <br>
        Unable to generate the significant income required for R&amp;D, software 
        and hardware, E.B.N. closed shop in 1998. But, in an act that ensured 
        its legacy as pioneers in underground media, Joshua Pearson created a 
        series of E.B.N.-style videos on the 2000 Presidential Election called 
        OTV News. <br>
        Raves &amp; E culture &#135; rise of the superstar DjYou're probably familiar 
        with the story of how a bunch of holidaymking DJs discovered the synergy 
        between house and Ecstasy in the clubs of Ibiza; how they brought the 
        anything-goes &quot;Balearic&quot; vibe back to cool-crippled London in 
        late 1987; how by the summer of '88, the trippy, futuristic sound of Chicago 
        acid house had spawned the most demonized British subculture since punk, 
        which then spilled out into the English countryside in '89 as inner city 
        warehouse parties evolvd into massive raves in fields near the M25. It's 
        a tale that, if not exactly sting-less, is certainly thrice told. But 
        there's a case for saying that musical revolutions actually have their 
        biggest impact a few years after their over-mythologized, &quot;official&quot; 
        origins, when the ideas have filtered from the metropolitan hip cliques 
        through to suburbia. <br>
        Just as punk continued to prosper and mutate in the provinces for years 
        after Sid Vicious's death, similarly rave really became a mass bohemia 
        during the three year period 1990-92. A huge circuit of legal, commercial 
        raves developed, while the liberalisation of licensing hours allowed for 
        rave-style clubs with all-night dancing. It was also in 1990 that home-grown 
        British house music really took off, breaking the dependence on Black 
        American imports from Chicago, Detroit and New York. As sampling and sequencing 
        technology got cheaper, hordes of teenage DJ/producers made tracks dirt-cheap 
        on simple computer set-ups in their bedrooms, then sold these &quot;white 
        label&quot; 12-inches direct to specialist record stores. Propelled by 
        the demographic heft of the rave nation, these &quot;hardcore&quot; rave 
        tunes bombarded the pop charts throughout 1991-92, despite next to no 
        airplay. Hardcore was also the birth of a uniquely British rave sound--a 
        mutant hybrid of hip hop breakbeats, seismic reggae bass, stabbing riffs 
        and mindwarping samples. At the pop end of the hardcore spectrum, groups 
        like The Prodigy, Altern-8, N-Joi, and SL2 invaded the Top Five. At the 
        more underground end, hardcore was the staple of the pirate radio stations 
        that infested the FM airwaves, and the ruling sound at illegal raves, 
        which resurged massively in 1991 through the efforts of crusty-traveller 
        outfits like Spiral Tribe. <br>
        As an anarchic cultural force, rave culture peaked in the summer of 1992, 
        when the biggest commercial raves peaked at 25 to 35 thousand, and the 
        techno traveller festival at Castlemorton Common in the West Country drew 
        an estimated forty thousand revellers during its six days of highly illegal 
        existence. By 1993, though, rave culture was in disarray: illegal raves 
        were systematically crushed by local police forces across the country, 
        the commercial rave circuit was in decline owing to bad vibes and rip-off 
        events. Hardcore had always been less utopian than the uplifting house 
        of 1988-89,. During the early Nineties, as ravers took progressively higher 
        doses of Ecstasy and amphetamine, the subculture's metabolic rate accelerated 
        drastically, resulting in ever-escalating tempos and a vibe that exhiliratingly 
        blended euphoria and aggression. The result was a teenage &quot;rush&quot; 
        culture that had more in common with videogames, extreme sports and joyriding 
        than late Sixties transcendence-through-altered-states. By 1993, hyperkinetic 
        hardcore rave plunged into the darkside, becoming the convulsive, bad-trippy 
        soundtrack to paranoia, panic attacks and eerie feelings of the uncanny 
        (all symptoms of long-term Ecstasy abuse). <br>
        By the mid-Nineties, rave culture--hitherto a chaos of social and sonic 
        mixing--was stratifying into increasingly narrowcast scenes organised 
        around race, class, and region. Once, you could go to a rave and not know 
        who you'd end up talking to, or what kind of music you'd be exposed to; 
        now, it was all too easy to choose a soundtrack that guaranteed satisfaction 
        but no surprises, and to ensure that you only mixed with &quot;your own 
        kind&quot;. Club culture became professionalized, with the rise of &quot;superclubs&quot;like 
        Cream, Renaissance and Ministry of Sound (mini-corporations who raked 
        in the money with merchandising, sponsorship deals, even club tours that 
        took their legendary &quot;vibe&quot; around the county), and with the 
        emergence of a Premier League of star DJs who travelled up and down the 
        UK, earning up to two thousand pounds for a two-hour set, and often playing 
        several gigs per night at the weekend. <br>
        All this took the edge out of E culture. As the late Gavin Hills, journalist 
        and acid house veteran, put it: &quot;Ecstasy culture is like a video-recorder 
        now: an entertainment device, something you use for a certain element 
        of pleasure. The club structure is like the pub structure: it has a role 
        in our society.&quot; That role is arguably as a kind of safety-valve/social-control 
        mechanism, with youth living for the temporary utopia of the loved-up 
        weekend rather than investing their idealism in a long-term collective 
        project of political change. It's the traditional working class &quot;culture 
        of consolation&quot;, with three E's replacing ten pints. And E, the magic 
        pill, has lost both its aura of enchantment and its status as the most 
        favoured drug of the &quot;chemical generation&quot;; it is now just one 
        brain-blitzing weapon in the neurochemical arsenal. Because of this &quot;polydrug&quot; 
        culture of mixing-and-matching, the atmosphere in clubs has changed: instead 
        of the clean, clear high of MDMA and the electric connection between total 
        strangers, the vibe is bleary and untogether. Instead of getting &quot;loved 
        up&quot;, people talk of getting &quot;messy&quot;. </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Reprise to scratch 
        video<br>
        The tidal wave of &quot;scratch video&quot;, particularly in the UK in 
        the early 80's, provides a useful case study. Inspired by access to new 
        tools, as well as by a strained cultural atmosphere, the early years of 
        the Thatcher-Reagan era, young videomakers began to &quot;scratch&quot; 
        the surface of broadcast television, trying to reveal those discourses 
        which had been hidden behind the media coverage, but were, nevertheless, 
        an essential part of the overall picture. Groups like Gorilla Tapes and 
        Duvet Brothers grabbed the recently introduced possibility of taping TV 
        programs with a VCR, and manipulated them in the editing studio (usually 
        a public access video workshop). // The scratch video makers used the 
        &quot;repeat-edit&quot; and other video tricks to turn Reagan's and Thatcher's 
        media images into stuttering marionettes that acted like aliens or lunatics 
        and said things which were the opposite of the official protocol, but 
        close, so one suspected, to the thoughts that really crossed their minds. 
        Scratch video was simultaneously a reaction to the ubiquitous television 
        environment, a tactical attack against its role as the mouthpiece of conservative 
        politics, and a new way of personal expression, of asserting one presence 
        in the egotistic world of media. Of course, it all ended up in a failure. 
        The main problem was access. Broadcast television ignored scratch video 
        until it had been cleaned off its political content and turned into a 
        new &quot;refreshing&quot; stylistic formula for music videos, comedy 
        programs and hamburger commercials. After this had happened, which did 
        not take long, scratch video makers began to receive commissions and their 
        style was adopted (as one style among many) by TV professionals. Scratch 
        video was co-opted by the very institution it had attempted to undermine. 
        Scratch features also survived in video art, but neutralised and &quot;sublimated&quot; 
        by museum and gallery walls.</font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">1990: Coldcut &lt;TIMBER&gt;<br>
        In the mid-1990s, claiming Steinski as one of their mentors, British duo 
        Coldcut released a set of audio-visual pieces &#150; The Natural Rhythms 
        Trilogy &#150; using many of the same techniques as Steinski&#146;s Motorcade. 
        However, instead of using visual material with inherently linked sound, 
        Coldcut took segments of nature videos (monkeys jumping, beetles tapping, 
        plants opening) and created sounds in the studio to match. Having synchronized 
        the individual video segments with the sounds, they were then edited into 
        whole video pieces that re-contextualize our understanding of the word 
        &quot;natural&quot; through the technological manipulation of these &quot;natural 
        rhythms&quot;. Evolution of the Vj, Visualisation software, etc.<br>
        In a 1996 piece that links the above described audio-visual works, Lucky 
        People Center International is a masterful documentary/audiovisual cut-up 
        groove. With an important message about the survival of the planet and 
        humanity, Erik Pauser and Johan S&ouml;derberg combine revolutionary use 
        of traditional talking head interviews with stunning footage of disparate 
        musical practices and the splendour that is the Earth&#146;s natural landscape. 
        The film travels all over the world to hear people describe their relationship 
        with the planet as mediated through music, descriptions that are then 
        cut-up and re-contextualized through the music of both the film&#146;s 
        subjects and that created by the filmmakers themselves. The result is 
        a tightly edited series of audiovisual songs woven together through an 
        underlying message about living life through music. The boundaries between 
        the image and audio information continually dissolve as spoken interviews 
        become lyrics atop music performed thousands of miles away, and where 
        the sounds and images of disparate cultures join in a symphony of unified 
        existence made possible through the technologies of audio-visual fragmentation. 
        <br>
        The unification of audio and visual information is becoming increasingly 
        present in theoretical circles as well. Of particular note is French film 
        theorist Michel Chion whose book Audio-Vision espouses the notion of trans-sensorial 
        perception, an understanding that the organs we usually attribute to sense 
        perception are only a part of how our bodies experience sensory information. 
        Just as what we call taste is often heavily reliant on smell, so too sound 
        is often processed on visual terms and vice-versa (as the term &quot;stereo 
        image&quot; illustrates). Similarly, Canadian film theorist William C. 
        Wees has explored the visual apparatus in his book Light Moving in Time. 
        Here Wees draws on increasing scientific information that suggests sight 
        is largely processed by the brain in conjunction with other areas of perception, 
        and that the eyes actually play only the smallest of roles in our experience 
        of vision. <br>
        In keeping with this increasing dissolution of the boundaries between 
        audio and visual perception, and drawing on experimentation&#146;s such 
        as the visual soundtracks of Canadian animation master Norman McLaren 
        and the audio-visual computer programming of John Whitney, Coldcut have 
        since forged new territory. Becoming what they call Digital Jockeys, Coldcut 
        have designed and made available custom software enabling their live performances 
        to be extensions of the studio processes used to make Natural Rhythms. 
        Together the &quot;digital duo&quot; manipulate audio and video samples 
        live, as DJs would manipulate their records. Here, however, Coldcut transcend 
        the traditional material manipulations of the DJ and move into the limitless 
        realm of digital exploration where sound and image can truly become one. 
        </font></p>
      <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br>
        Hexstatic &lt;Bass Invader&gt;<br>
        Bootleg culture<br>
        Eclectic method &lt;Forget Jones&gt;<br>
        Vj events</font></p>
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