I took a hiatus from this series to tighten it up. Then I noticed something crucial was missing - I’d never made any attempt to provide a map, any co-ordinates, for what I’m talking about.

So here it is: a short breakdown of key types of VJing, as it stands.

1. The AV Geek

Obviously most VJs are AV geeks. But when you track back to the early works by people like Coldcut and Hexstatic, you see where it all came from.

The AV geek likes to sample. Loves to sample, in fact. Because they’re hooked on video. The more directly, and literally, the video can relate to the sound - the better.

The results have a strong element of pastiche and pop-post-modern. Two of the best contemporaries in this mould are Eclectic Method and Addictive TV.

The laziest AV geeks loop samples from Fear and Loathing and the Kubrick archive with zero editing and little live manipulation. Watch you don’t fall into that trap.

2. The Mo-Graphic Designer

No less important in the history and development of VJing. On a bad day, this is the kind of performer you’d describe as a Screensaver VJ because their style is more closely aligned with computer than film.

At the one extreme, you’ll see the High Concept Electrician - tinkerers so deep in the machine they can produce sets through the visualisation of feedback/ distortion/ channels from old analogue equipment.

At the other, you’ll see beautiful, bespoke 3-D motion graphic design and a high-level of MIDI synchronisation. Dispensing with film allows a much more accurate and minimalist representation of sound. See below.

3. The Animator

I haven’t seen this too often in clubs and it tends to be less live. The first example that came to mind was Mr Scruff. As he illustrates his albums with line drawings, it makes perfect sense to animate them for performance.

If anyone’s got a better or more developed example, please share. VJing could be a rich terrain for the old-fashioned animator but it tends not to be how it’s done. Perhaps the live editing is too challenging.

4. The Director

I’ve picked out Ben Strebel here because he’s a huge talent and a good friend.

This kind of VJ is a director first and foremost - VJing provides an opportunity to test out their original material in front of a large audience. It’s like live showreeling, to an extent.

Ben does a lot more than that, and his performances involve motion graphics and animation too. But his work in music video and short film directs and characterises what he does live on a night.

Here’s one of his latest music videos for the Stereo MCs.

5. The Light Artist

Artists like Simian Mobile Disco and many other big name headliners perform with LED shows. They strip back to light and light alone.

The very best in this field, however, work more along the lines of installation. They aren’t shackled by a single screen. Their projections are multiple and the results are breathtaking.

Massive Attack have moved into this area in the last few years, but my favourites remain The Light Surgeons for their constant boundary-pushing and absolute focus on creating 3D-lit moving habitats wrapped right around their audience.

It’ll be back to business with How to VJ #5. But if anyone wants to challenge these loose categories - add, amend or expand - go for it. Post a comment.

Previously: #3 Keep it in time.

It’s some weird science. But it must be as popular as happy-slapping these days.

Improv Everywhere have been zapping reality with orchestrated human video effects - slow motion, freeze frame - and watching their latest work it clicked. That’s 3. A trend?

I’d say Michel Gondry has something to do with it. Be Kind Rewind aired the idea feature-length for the mainstream, and music videos - beyond Gondry’s - were making up the rules before.

Manipulating reality to mimic a video effect now requires more skill and effort than making a film. Orchestrating a “cinematic moment” live, and generating the precision of an edited film spontaneously… Well that technique’s alive in the commercial world after Honda’s Difficult is Worth Doing TV spot.

There’s a few key characteristics to this as a trend, if you could call it that:

1. Liveness

2. Real people

3. A real context

4. Mass participation

5. Precise results

I much prefer Improv Everywhere to its commercial progeny, and you should peep their excellent blog for the full range of their playful anarchy. It’s more compelling because of point (3) - it has a real context.

The participants are larger in number (see point 4). But it’s more important that they’re volunteers. They choose to be there because they want to be there. And as long as you’re paying people to do something, and controlling the environment, it’s not a real context.

Gondry? That’s art. That isn’t live or real - but it more than makes up for it with its inventiveness and dedication to point (5) - blissful, beautiful precision.

What’s your take on this as a trend? Do you agree with these characteristics, or have I left my lens cap on here?

I like sitting in the dark watching pictures move. Is that a crime?

It was a perfectly acceptable pastime until it became more modish to watch things on a tiny screen. To cut things together yourself and anatomise the image on Photoshop.

Here are two projects that might excite the old-fashioned film fan with a digital eye.

The Art of the Title Sequence is a wealthy resource and lets you unpick those dense intros. Often the best or most memorable bit of a feature film. I’ve been watching a few intact. You pick up a lot fast, because the best ones are so tight.

Brendan Davies’ Cinema Redux takes it in the opposite direction. Each of his painstaking works captures an entire film in evenly spaced screengrabs. I found this just as enriching. You can tell so much by a glance at one image.

By training the eye to deconstruct moving pictures, you learn how to build them better. Or it’s just an excuse to peer in close at expertly good cinema. Either way - get these sites up on your little screen and enjoy.

I don’t know where you live. But I live in London. And I’m seeing more colour on the city walls every day.

Street artists are embracing happytalism (no need for a dictionary, just click it). We’re getting Space Invaders and 8-bit written bright. Decayed pillars restructured with Lego bricks. Buildings transformed into cartoon monsters.

It’s happening globally, which is the most exciting thing about it. I’m sure Os Gemeos must have set much of the paint in motion. But bucketloads of what’s happening now is new and transformative - going well beyond “graffiti” and exploring all the senses. Using every material to hand. Even balloons.

These pictures come from Washington D.C. and are the work of D.BILLY. I’m massively impressed.

Puts a whole new, and knowing, spin on a huge visual trend. Are we kids again? Or clowns?

For more on D.BILLY, posts at Designboom, And I Am Not Lying and PSFK.

Plus check out D.BILLY’s Flickr photostream.

And if you’re feeling the artier side of this new wave of street art, Ian Tait’s written a nice post about sculptural graffiti in Brighton.

But what’s beneath the well-upholstered face of Cheshire?

One porcupine (hedgehog?). Dead. Roadkill. Did not puncture car tyre? Cartoons may be inaccurate.

Small boy said “thank you”. I stepped to curb to let him pass on scooter. Astonishment.

OUTRAGE. Coca-Cola at £1.15 per bottle? Emo cashier speechless when I handed him £1 coin. Although that may just be his “look”.

Best tombstone in graveyard? For couple who died two centuries ago. Their dates don’t match. But thoroughly modern stonework. Pimp my ancestry?

NORTHERN MEN. Cropped hair. Blunt tone. Constant threat of warmth. Tends to strike around the sixth pint.

Leather-skinned hags with silver bags. Jackets to match. What’s the catch? Internal organs. Poisoned by cocktails and bile.

So what’s the punchline, and can I get it with chips? There’s no conclusion to this miscellany. But I re-read T.E. Hulme’s Notes on Language and Style this weekend. And he was responsible for how I saw these incidentals.

All emotion depends on real solid vision or sound. It is physical.

A man cannot write without seeing at the same time a visual signification before his eyes. It is the image which precedes the writing and makes it firm.

The three poems Henry Stead performed at the launch night for London Poetry Systems.

In order, they are:

- The Love of Phlebas

- A Visionary’s Visionary Vision

- An Ancient Process

Thanks to Kaara for her design work on Phlebas. All three visual scores were outputted through an Edirol V4 mixer, performed with motion dive .tokyo, and pre-produced in Adobe Premier and Adobe After Effects.

You can watch all of the poets on our Vimeo group site.

Luke sent me a very informative link from Boing Boing yesterday. If you’re not in the habit of making video, you can skip this post.

I won’t pretend that Fair Use is riveting. But it’s something you need to understand if you want to sample material that isn’t your own.

This piece is available in full here and the Centre for Social Media has a lot more to help you get your head around Creative Commons law and Fair Use.

Why does any of this concern me? Well, it affects my VJing work, for one. I’ve not yet met a VJ who doesn’t use a single sample in their set. Neither have I met a VJ who’s entirely comfortable about their legal footing in doing so.

But a VJ should aspire to sample less and less as they develop. There’s a lot of insight in the book and DVD by D-Fuse and Michael Faulkner on this subject.

And whatever you’re doing, whether it’s original or sampled, it should be transformative. That’s the whole point.

I think reading up on Fair Use is an effective way to quality control your work and ensure you stand out from the YouTube mash-ups. I’d recommend it.

A lovely photoblog post over at Fubiz triggered this spot of digging.

Ryan Cashman shot his light-paint piano player in San Diego. High five to Ryan!

This was a live performance by AntiVJ Lab in Bridwell Prison, Bristol, earlier this year.

And the best I’ve found so far are Japanese crew PIKAPIKA. Unfortunately, all their most high-res work is on Revver and I’ve not cracked the embedding yet.

If you’ve got time, you should really check it out here.

The Scunthorpe Problem. Ring any bells?

Back in 1996, residents of Scunthorpe, Penistone and Lightwater were left in the dark by AOL when their town names were blocked by obscenity filters. Apparently Google did the same.

Thanks to the galloping speed of progress, we have an enhanced version of the Scunthorpe Problem. And here it comes courtesy of the right-wing press.

America’s OneNewsNow site has been autoreplacing the word “gay” with the word “homosexual”, rechristening Tyson Gay as the Fastest Homosexual on Earth.

Putting to one side the agenda of OneNewsNow, this raises a much broader question. The word vs. the image. While PCism continues to butcher the word, our visual filters are dropping and dropping. Aren’t they…?

Two counterpoints to conclude on here: a recently banned Heinz commercial, and the words of Paul Virilio. See what you think - which is harder? The word, or the image?

…in a rapidly globalizing world there is no longer, strictly speaking, either Right or Left, and … since the fall of the Berlin Wall, these things no longer have any meaning. All that remains is the great audiovisual dilemma, the conflict between the soft (the word) and the hard (the image).

Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

Toronto street artist Posterchild went to New York this month and transformed digital ad platforms into stained-glass graffiti installations. Watch the video below. (via)

At the same time, the CutUp Collective are removing London ad posters wholesale, cutting them into thousands of bits, then reconfiguring the display space with their recycled material. (via)

Do corporate identities represent the last big remix taboo? Now that brands are present in social online spaces, will they ever let themselves be personalised?

Or is it left for the street artist to educate them in humanity?

Previously: Brand logos remixed; Skullphone hijacks New York billboards.