The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, between 19, organized by Andy Warhol contributed to the fusion of music and visuals in a party context. From 1965 to 1966 in San Francisco, the visual shows by artist collectives such as The Joshua Light Show and the Brotherhood of Light accompanied The Grateful Dead concerts, which were inspired by the Beat generation-in particular the Merry Pranksters-and fueled by the "expansion of consciousness" from the Acid Tests. Some of these experiments were linked to the music, but most of the time they functioned as decorations." These came to be known as liquid light shows. In clubs and private events in the 1960s "people used liquid-slides, disco balls and light projections on smoke to give the audience new sensations. Lights could be adjusted directly via the sliders, through the use of a pedal, and with toggle switches that worked like individual keys." "In place of a keyboard, the Sarabet had a console with graduated sliders and other controls, more like a modern mixing board. Her light music consisted of environmental color fields that produced a scale of light intensities and color. In a book from 1893 that documents his work, Bishop states: "I procured an organ, and experimented by building an attachment to the keys, which would play with different colored lights to correspond with the music of the instrument." Ä«etween 19, Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, a piano soloist, created a new technological art form called Nourathar, which means "essence of light" in Arabic.
Bainbridge Bishop, who contributed to the development of the color organ, was "dominated with the idea of painting music". The color organ is a mechanism to make colors correspond to sound through mechanical and electromechanic means. These historical references are shared with other live audiovisual art forms, such as Live Cinema, to include the camera obscura, the panorama and diorama, the magic lantern, color organ, and liquid light shows. Historically, VJing gets its references from art forms that deal with the synesthetic experience of vision and sound. The term is also used to describe the performative use of generative software, although the word "becomes dubious (.) since no video is being mixed". In addition to the selection of media, VJing mostly implies realtime processing of the visual material.
One of the key elements in the practice of VJing is the realtime mix of content from a "library of media", on storage media such as VHS tapes or DVDs, video and still image files on computer hard drives, live camera input, or from computer generated visuals. In both situations VJing is the manipulation or selection of visuals, the same way DJing is a selection and manipulation of audio. The term VJing became popular in its association with MTV's Video Jockey but its origins date back to the New York club scene of the 70s. This results in a live multimedia performance that can include music, actors and dancers. VJing often takes place at events such as concerts, nightclubs, music festivals and sometimes in combination with other performative arts. Characteristics of VJing are the creation or manipulation of imagery in realtime through technological mediation and for an audience, in synchronization to music.
VJing (pronounced: VEE-JAY-ing) is a broad designation for realtime visual performance. The VJ Book and VJ:Audio Visual Art + VJ Culture