Firstly we are now almost a week away from the beginning of the 2009 edition of the Mapping VJ Festival. The site has launched, the schedule is up! 10 days of VJing, clubbing, performances, workshops, talks, installations and outdoor projections on the facades of several major historical buildings in Geneva, Switzerland. While I am very satisfied with the overall program that the Mapping team, of which I am a member, have come up with I do have my favorites.

In particular are the visual antics of Sans Culotte coupled with the Breakcore mashing sounds of Electric Kettle. In general this night is dedicated to the offbeat with acts Xerac and Mec. Not for everyone. Sometimes we curate for ourselves. I think we deserve it.

i dont know anything about music from sans culotte on Vimeo.

I will be documenting the festival video wise. It is probably the best way for someone who is involved with the festival to actually see everything.

Now to back track a little the weekend before last I was jumping around from town to town doing modul8 workshops. Somewhere along the way I saw some things of interest. Firstly there was the Sound:Frame festival. The festival itself lasts a month. The exhibition of the festival took place at the Kunsthalle located almost square in the center of Vienna. Events don’t take place every day of the festival. Each weekend was devoted to either parties, a/v performances and workshops with the exhibition in the Kunsthalle open to the public for the entire month.

The exhibition itself was quite impressive comprising of installations that revolved around the theme of audio visual culture in its myriad forms. Surprisingly for me there were also some drawings and paintings that pointed to a desire for audio visual festivals to become more inclusive further blurring the lines between art, performance, commerce and VJing’s common trappings of the night club. There were some new works and quite a few familiar ones, especially in the screening areas, of Pfadfenderei, Luma Luanisch, 4youreye and V-atak, all veterans of the Mapping Festival.

As I was mainly at Sound:Frame to conduct a workshop and the weekend consisted mainly of workshops I sadly did not see much VJing. I was however very pleased to have been present for a performance by Claudia Rohrmoser & Ritornell. The performance took place inside Claudias installation in the Kunsthalle. Three projections of the same image. For the performance that was accompanied by the experimental music group Ritornell Claudia used modul8 in combination with a wacom tablet and a Lemur. Her imagery of dripping colors and dancing lines over filmic like washes of color was painterly and somewhat reminiscent of the work of Stan Brakhage. The lines and washes complimented the carefully improvised sounds of Ritornell.

The following day was the workshop. After a group announcement and introduction with all the participants and workshop hosts that included a variety of disciplines we all entered our assigned rooms and roles. The workshops took place at a facility called wienXtra-mediazentrum. Very nicely furnished and equipped I had an embedded VGA cable and a sound system. The class was filled (the maximum allowed registrants was 20 people) and I preceded with six hours of an in depth tour of modul8 rounding up in the last 45 minutes with, with the help of Florian of Luanisch, a quick and simple TripleHead2go setup.

There is no rest. In the morning early on the train to Brno via Breclav. The Multi-Place Festival is aptly named. Events, workshops, parties took place in Czek, Slovakia and Poland. From what I can gather its activities functioned in a decentralized manner. If someone somewhere had an idea and wanted to proactive it was brought into the fold and posted to the multi-place web site. Lena, a high energy person quickly escorted me to the arts school in Brno while also explaining to me life in Brno and how the Apple authorized reseller in Brno was glad to provide some support for the festival. It was still a bit early for the workshop so a small group of us gathered in the cafe next to the school, six or seven of us talking, about our respective endeavors and exchanging stickers.

Our workshop took place in a small room on the top floor of the school building. Lena improvised some blinds with a black cloth and a large piece of white foam core for a screen and away we went.

Back in Vienna that evening I was invited to VJ at a party at place called Ragnarhof. A former factory now an arts space where my hosts, the Do.Phunk party have their monthly soirees. This particular party consisted of the Do.Phunk crew but was actually a birthday party for one of their friends. And it was quite a party. Sharing the beamers with me that night was the designer and VJ Sito. With all of the videos I get to see as part of the Mapping Team, who does what can get a bit fuzzy so I was a bit embarrassed when I realized that we had actually selected him for the DubStep night for the Mapping Festival this year.

As I was watching Sito VJ I then remembered one of the main reasons we selected him. He has an extraordinary sense of how to use the particles in modul8 by creating clusters of his iconography and crowding them together into different compositions. I thought myself very lucky to be able to see a VJs work live before their performance at the Mapping. While documentation definitely helps, and we are seeing a lot more of that these days, there is nothing like the experience of the energy, the music, the audience. I am really looking forward to seeing him light up the Zoo.