DESIGNER, MEET YOUR DOPPELGANGER!
Uncanny parallels between graphic design and electronic music are bringing two creative worlds even closer together.
A diamond needle skitters across a platter, then drops into a groove. Dad says the needles cost the earth and forbids you to touch the turntable while it's playing. But the record shines deliciously, like a woman's dark hair wound around the platter. So you touch it. Pretty soon you're touching it constantly, startling yourself with new sounds, like communiqués with gorgeous aliens. One day after school you're caught: man-handling the records shamelessly, cracking the diamond needle to bits, making a fantastic racket. Sound familiar?
Maybe not. Perhaps you were a good egg and respected the hi-fi. But then again, as a young designer your sins probably ran along parallel lines to the baby-DJ's: snipping lovely pictures from your mother's magazines; re-papering your bedroom walls with doodles, like curling vines. Remember the startling joy of signing your name in a new font of your own devising? Then as now, nothing beats the bang of putting two disparate images, colors or sounds together; just a little tweak can make an image fresher or a line of music extra-hot. To some, a talent for collage and juxtaposition is a mere knack, not art. To designers and DJs, though, it's the lifeblood of how they create new things.
Graphic designers and DJs don't just live overlapping lives; increasingly they're actually the same people. In many ways, these creative disciplines share a common, decidedly post-modern personality. Designers' and DJs' work both deceive in their simplicity: how artistic is it, really , to make new sounds or images by tweaking or re-arranging existing ones? Converted in a single generation from analog to digital technologies, designers and DJs have learned to shrug off disbelievers who question the artistic value of their collages, or who scoff at art forms like theirs with a more populist or applied bent. Both groups have grown and splintered into niche specialties. 'Design' is a huge umbrella term covering graphic, type, environmental, industrial, and other sub-categories. 'DJ music' ranges from turntablism--scratching or otherwise using a turntable as an acoustic instrument--to electronic music producers, who use old- and new-school technologies to mix samples and found-sounds into fresh new music. Not only do many designers moonlight as DJs, the visual-jockey (VJ) trend pairs visual designers and musicians even more closely, creating live shows in which visuals and music interact and comment on each other. Like any new collaboration, the results can be mixed: at its worst, pure eye candy bopping to a beat; at its height, a gorgeously engrossing experience. Examining the dovetails and challenges common to DJs and designers holds clues to where all of us are heading creatively next.
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In the dance-halls and design studios of Berlin, mixing images with sound is thoroughly natural. Berliners have always pursued radical experiment in politics, music and art. Fifteen years after the Wall's collapse and Germany's volatile reunification, Berlin's electronic DJs and visual-jockeys (VJs) are pressing the limits of music forward, making video-montage and live electronic performance a positively expressive art.
“DJs react directly to the audience and pick the records as they go along. It makes total sense to hear it live,” says Heiko Hoffman, editor-in-chief of Groove, the leading magazine internationally for electronic music and DJ culture. Heiko radiates a nice nerdiness quite at odds with his authority in the DJ world. He wears black-rimmed glasses, a black concert t-shirt, and beat-around black pants. We're sipping Vietnamese soup in a quiet side street of Prenzlauer Berg, a section of East Berlin that morphed in fifteen years from a neglected ghetto to a sleek first-cousin of Manhattan's Tribeca. Robust red geraniums stir in the windowbox near our table; outside I can hear children's voices, singing hopscotch.
“With electronic live sets, the main challenge is finding new hardware where you can more easily interact with the music,” Heiko continues, politely taking a soup-sip. “The keyboard and mouse are not really the best way to deal with music.” This difficulty bears a striking resemblance to graphic designers' struggles with their own technology: the frustrations of drawing freehand with a mouse, for example. Ten years ago, electronica's capabilities as a live art were limited to mostly crude novelties: first, adding keyboard effects to pre-recorded music on DAT; then inserting pre-planned sequencing loops live to laptop-driven music. “But with software like Ableton's LIVE, it makes it easier to say: okay, I have this beat and I have this loop or sound, let's put them together, right now,” Heiko continues. “The computer memory is fast enough nowadays; the crucial thing is that it all works in real-time.” Hardware-software combinations like Final Scratch-Traktor FS allow DJs to network together mp3s on laptop or iPod, sequencer loops, CDs, and old-school wax and manipulate everything manually—whether by scratching or madly twisting knobs and levels on a mixing board.
The urge to improvise electronic music live resembles, in some ways, the current trend among graphic designers to use computers to make more tactile, hand-made-looking images. In both cases, 'perfect' computer-generated art feels cold until an improvised, rough-edged touch awakens its expressive power.
On the design side of things, VJs like Bauhouse, Visual Kitchen, Lillevan and Pfadfinderei are matter-of-factly blurring all kinds of creative divides. Their work fills crumbling post-Communist dance clubs and philharmonic halls alike; as designers, they move easily between traditional graphic design work and improvised VJ/DJ sets. The imagery ranges from film reels and still photography, to mad animations and abstract shapes and colors.
Fabian Grobe and Clemens Wittkowski, the duo known as Bauhouse, articulate their creative process as a conversation between pictures and music: “We collect footage from TV, films, advertisements, hand-held camera reels, sometimes graphics. We build up a huge archive on our hard discs, and then, like a puzzle we play with the material. After a while the material is leading us to certain topics. Once we have that topic we build and find more material to emphasize it, or bring up new aspects to it. Images provoke music and music provokes images.”
Bauhouse's VJ set Embedded Entertainment offers a powerful example of how this process works. The loop begins with a child streaking joyfully through a field of wheat, tumbling momentarily, then continuing to run. The shushing sound of wheat builds into a beat that shifts and tumbles, too. As the video loop syncopates, more details emerge: the boy's shoulders are draped heavily in an American flag; the beat quickens as he falls more and more frequently. As video-loop and beat recur, an unsettling ambiguity emerges: is the boy happy or in flight from something wicked? Why is he alone in this vast field? The audio-visual scape takes on a feeling like Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World : a rural landscape rendered faintly sinister by emptiness. Watching Bauhouse's work, you get a hint of the immersive power of music and images interacting, a sound-landscape that feel like a fresh universe, a place to lose yourself in sight, sound, detail and movement. Marcel Duchamp, a true king of the cut-and-paste, nailed it when he said: “The only thing that is not art is inattention.”
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design,
January/February 2004
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