While nightclubs in the early 1990s could get by with featuring strobe lights pulsating with the beat, organizers of today's nightclub events have to offer more to attract clubgoers.
Alongside the disc jockeys — DJs — are so-called visual jockeys — VJs — and together they shape the image of the club. Like their sound colleagues, VJs fashion the mood, atmosphere and tact of the lights from track to track. In major cities across the world they have formed their own small scene.
Organizations representing VJs, such as those in Hamburg and Berlin, agree that an evening of electronic music in a club can’t be pulled off without a VJ.
“It was simply the next step. Pictures were modified to sound and over time it became more compositional,” said Olaf Kretschmar of the Club Commission Berlin.
Club visuals were brought to a new level of sophistication at a wild techno festival in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Previously, light shows were commonly integrated into rock concerts, but in the electronic music genre, the light effects have a special meaning. Andrea Rothaug, who is with a Hamburg club, said the visuals are largely tied in with dancing.
In Germany there are a handful of VJs active in Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich and an international association has been formed. As in the past, however, the biggest location for Germany’s wild techno night life is Berlin.
VJ Tobias Last started there about five years ago. The 28-year-old, who calls himself Kiritan Flux, studied digital media. He has learned the ropes of the software used to create the visual effects and also has made films. Like other VJs, he has put together his own VJ programs. It’s important to him that the images do not look like a story told in a movie.
“People should be dancing, not standing still,” said Last. Aside from that he said it’s not about producing as much as possible ahead of time and simply pulling it off the laptop. Since it is technically possible by using two DVD players, the images can be scratchy, just like the music.
Tasso Treis of Cologne last year helped create the visuals for the closing event of the Love Parade in Essen, Germany. Treis explained that geometric forms such as circles are used in minimal techno, while pictures that help create a mood go with abstract music. If the track contains meditation or relaxation sounds, Treis tries to reproduce that visually.
He said only VJs and DJs who are well coordinated are able to create such moments of synchronicity. Bastian Fritz, who works as an events organizer for the Tape Club, emphasized the point.
“The DJ and the VJ must fit together. Then something new can develop and you can give a good event even better emphasis,” he said.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS