VJING. Aesthetics and politics of the environment-image

The figure of the VJ or visual jockey is key for understanding the appearance and current uses of what we shall call the “environment-image”, a kind of image which is produced for an audience in situ, whose emotional reaction has a retroactive effect on the actual production of the image flow. It is important to discuss a function related to this type of image, that of influencing a social environment in order to establish a shared rhythm. Furthermore, this coordinated rhythm influences the perception of each person in respect to the social group which circumstantially forms the audience. Citing arguments such as those of the historian William H. McNeill, the anthropologist Michael James Winkelman or the architect and theorist Iñaki Ábalos, but also drawing on the observations of audiovisual media creators like Jonas Mekas, we will see how a considerable alliance of stimuli and conditions in the environment has an effect on the participants’ states of consciousness, resulting in the appearance of this idea of the “us” as a link of identity. In short, the research places the practice of VJing as part of the history of art and the contemporary modes of sociability, taking as principal evidence the aesthetic and political dimensions of image. In this way, we gain access to a conception of image by placing attention on the bonds established with the resonant rhythms produced by the DJ and, in addition, with an entire system of environmental and relational stimuli. What’s more, this leads us to elaborate on the project of Gilles Deleuze, adding to the two types of image he proposes, the “movement-image” and the “time-image”, a different typology, with functions and effects that are both also radically distinct.