Okinawa69 (Tasso Okinawa) sits comfortably witin my non-existent top 10 VJ’s. His reputation preceded our meeting through videos from VMS, his long collaboration with the Cologne based Kompact label and a story that his V4 has a dent in it as a result of slapping the a/b buttons while wearing rings.

I finally met him during the 2009 edition of the Mapping Festival. His work, constant varations of geometrical shapes and still imagery, provided the Zoo with a smooth, light sensation. When observing him in action he is extremely engaged in what he is doing. His body moves to the music and when transitioning materials his movements are akin to a combination of machine operator and ballet dancer.

Mapping Festival meetings are always very brief. Between occasional skype chats and a collection of chances for face to face in Cologne and the UAF in Austria I was able to conduct an email based interview with him that charts his timeline and talks about what it is that he loves about the medium, what makes it work and, not to be too cheeky, how much he loves Modul8.

The images included in this interview are from the performances of Okinawa 69 and Bruno Tait during the Urban Artforms Festival in Austria during the DJ sets of Carl Craig and Sven Väth.

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m8us: What is your history with VJ’ing? What got you interested in the medium?

Tasso: I studied Art and Design in Cologne. During my studies I focused for quite a while on textile prints and flyer design. It was only a matter of time until that started to influence my other work.

As I was promoting partys in Cologne together with my partner-in-crime shumi, I became aware of the fact that we didn’t want to stop at promotion only. We wanted to be part of the party itself. So we started to do our own little evening in Cologne’s hallmackenreuther, every Tuesday evening. The owner of hallmackenreuther is an avid collector of design classics and had old wega tv’s in his bar. That’s where we started to show videos from VHS, cut together by us and presented together with Shumi’s music as a dj.

Urban Art Forms 2010 – videos by the PXLZ feat. Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69

Later the hallmackenreuther opened its basement with two beamers and a professional DJ-Set-Up. Also, friends of ours had just programmed a vj-software called “almost sync.” That’s how it all began: shumi playing records in the basement of hallmackenreuther and me, mixing clips with my laptop. We called our evening “micro.”

md8.us: What kind of materials were you using for imagery back then? Were you transferring what you had on VHS onto the computer or were you creating new material? How were you assembling it and what were your sources for inspiration?

Tasso: Back in the days I started with found footage and sampled movies like koyaanisqatsi (lol), but pretty soon I got bored with that approach. I wanted to visualize music and not just show random clips.

So I generated my first loops with the computer, consisting of simple stuff like squares and circles. That was imagery giving me enough freedom to still manipulate the clips in a live surrounding via software.

More than anything else, music is my main source of inspiration, and since the music back then was quite “minimal” and repetitive, at least in Cologne, it made perfect sense to work with simple, abstract forms.

But, alas! The projectors available were quite shitty in those days and you were forced to work with high contrast and monochrome images to squeeze some persuasiveness out of them. That’s how the “superimpose” effect to be found on the classical Panasonic mixer became my best friend.

md8.us: What was the public reaction to your work like back then? Was there an awareness of what you were doing?

Urban Art Forms 2010 – videos by the PXLZ feat. Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69

Tasso: At first only friends were aware of what we’re doing there. I can remember lots of occasions where people asked me:

“So what are you doing here tonight?”
“I’m mixing the videos”
“What videos?”

But with the growing availability of projectors there also was more need for content and people to play it. Everybody had some friends investing in the matter and so the network started to grow. VJs started more and more to play at festivals, commercial and cultural events reaching a much bigger audience. In the meantime promoters have been convinced that the VJ should be on the flyer as well… if those haven’t been also designed by the VJs themselves.

md8.us: Getting back to your own time line, where did yours and Shumi’s VJ work evolve from hallmackenreuther?

Tasso: At the soma festival we teamed up with dirk and kjell from the bruno tait video trio for the first time. We threw together our equipment and skills and started to play bigger shows at festivals besides preparing visuals for bands and labels.

bruno tait was also vj’ing for quite some time, also used a clean grafical style so we got to be best friends. Our parties and budgets got bigger and this gave us the opportunity to buy our own projectors and create individual set ups that allowe the audience to better see the visuals.

md8.us: You mention a shift towards a more of a clean graphical style. Can you expand on the advantages of this approach? How does a graphical approach differ from that of an ‘image’ based one, as in using solid shapes vs. photographs?

Tasso: It was again on one hand a availability of software and a matter of style at that time. software like Adobe´s Illustrator/ After Effects and Cinema 4D worked better and better together. Since we mostly played all night and didn´t want to play any imagery twice we needed a lot of content. When working with graphics it is much easier to combine different clips together.

Urban Art Forms 2010 – videos by the PXLZ feat. Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69

Our approach in vj´ing together with a dj is to mix from record to record. That´s because we were raised with vinyl and tracks on vinyl have a beginning and an end. They are produced to be played from beginning to the end and then be mixed into the next one. So that´s how we mixed. We followed the records and tried to introduce a new set of clips with every record. Of course we had our pop moments with sampled footage or photos. We even shared or remixed clips from other vjs. It depended very much on the moment, on the music, the crowd, the location and the setup. No night was the same!

md8.us: How did Modul8 contribute to this approach?

Tasso: Oh, m8 was a revolution! It was clean fast, and graphic. It was exactly what we needed. From PSD and AI we were used to work with layers. Duplicating them and having control of everything very fast was just what we were looking for.

Our set up was always to use a Edirol mixer and a couple of MacBooks. Everybody was preparing his content live and we would play ping pong together. So one would mix in a clip and then the next one would take over, and so on.

For this m8 was perfect. We could easily sync over LAN and still would have to respond to the clip the other one just played. It was always very important for us to make “the perfect” mix, just as the djs.

We didn´t use almost sync anymore cause we couldn´t control it with MIDI. other softwares like resolume or isadora we couldn´t identify with. m8 was made by vj´s for vj´s like us. Duddenly we felt like we were part of a culture.

md8.us: Do you have any ideas about the direction this medium is taking? Where do you want to go with it?

Tasso: If you mean in general, it´s more and more dividing into the preproduction scene like mapping and processing. The industry is putting a lot of money in it cause it´s a good way to advertise their products in public with an arty touch. It´s a new kind of billboard. Mapping just looks awesome and it will be one future of architecture.

In classic live visuals, vjs work closer with bands, acts, djs and labels to visualize their music on stage and for netpromo/DVDs etc.

For me visuals need music. I always believed that visuals should rather just look nice and react to the music than tell a story and catch too much attention of the crowd. My favorite dancer is the one with closed eyes. That is why my work is so abstract and just works with forms, shades and light. It´s about retina reception. Club culture was always about leaving reality behind, forgetting time, dancing and not wanting to leave the club.

So if you ask me where i want to go with it… I´d say more stage designs for labels/events and more tour visuals for musicians. Both should be accompanied by videos and documentation.

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Artist: POPNONAME
Titel: Hello Gorgeous (KOMPAKT)
Video: Bruno Tait & Okinawa 69
Prod: Tasso Treis • Dir/Edit : Dirk Rauscher • Techn. Dir: Kjell Rijntjes • Raum: Jonathan Hähn
Contact: promo@kompakt.fm
popnoname.de • kompakt.fm • okinawa69.de • brunotait.de • dirkrauscher.de