Interview: Vent Media

Barret Hodgson (theMuteBoy/ vjCoda) and James Brouwer (Mijim) run Vent Media, an innovative design company who slapped that massive screen behind the back of the bar at Brownes, amongst other things. Utilising still and moving images, often in conjunction with other art forms for nightclubs, festivals, galleries and theatre, they mix, sample, blend and scratch images to generate a unique set of sequences and improvised real-time visual tracks. Barret took the opportunity to (ahem) vent spleen about the way he operates...

Who do you work with on a regular basis?
Detonate have been giving us a lot of work. They have taken over Brownes in Hockley, and we installed a big screen in there with a baroque ornate frame, and have sorted out the content for that which will be showing every day. I worked onto a baroque painting that I changed, reducing the colours - quite subtle, really. We went out around Nottingham, north, south, east and west, driving in towards Brownes. On the top of the car we set three cameras capturing different angles, and then explored layering up the journey and really slowing it down. We’ve used the street lights for colour. I started thinking about the hues of browns and reds, the reduced pallet you get in baroque painting.

Have you got an established style?
My own personal style is about reducing palettes and thinking about the content itself, as well as a structure and performance in the palettes you use - and even compositions that give the flow of narrative a more abstract sense, so you are exploring what makes a visual structure. When working live usually you’ll either have directly interactive things - stuff that uses time signals to generate itself - or sequences of loops, which is how your library is, whether they are seamless loops or not.  Then it's how you start thinking about how to structure a more open, wider narrative based on those individual elements within it, that are looping and jumping around that timeline.

What theatre work have you done?
Earlier this year I did a play at the Lakeside called Smile by Steven Lowe, a prestigious writer based in Nottingham; he wrote The Spirit of the Man about Brian Clough a few years ago for the Playhouse. Anyway, there is constant projection throughout the play and the main character is manipulating the content - supposedly live on stage, but it's actually me in the background doing it.

So you're like a third-party artist, a performer behind the scenes...
Yeah. I really don’t mind in a play situation. I get incredibly nervous, especially with theatre work; the live aspect is all about cueing and being on the ball, whereas in the VJ work I can be improvising for hours, doing it how I feel, and it reflects that. I'm doing another play with Steven soon - we're talking about how we could use six projectors, front and back at the same time, to immerse the stage - more to do with textures and projection, and not such precise imaging as the last one to evoke atmosphere and mood - something more within the realms of stage design and art installation.

Do you enjoy working in interactive arts?
Yeah, we try to go as much as we can, when there's the time and budget for it. I am doing more programming for it now, which is more interactive work directly. We are doing an audio/visual piece at the National Space Centre in Leicester. They’ve got one of the 360 degree domes, so there are six projectors doing the full environment – it’ll be fantastic! I’ve been working on various methods of doing it. I find myself turning into more of a geek than I realise!

What's agitating your geek gland at the moment, then?
At the moment I'm very excited about Quartz Composer. It’s a modular based programming tool that you get free with a Mac, as part of their developers tools. It allows people with little traditional programming background to work with the depth of possibilities of interactive media. We also use a combination of Max/Msp and Isadora, as well as your more traditional creative applications. So yeah, I wake up at 2am and think "Oooh…" it’s so tempting. I can’t help but get up and start programming until six in the morning, then realising I’ve got to work the next day which is quite sad, really!

You seem to cover an awful lot of disciplines…
Yeah, I do like working in a diverse field. I think it all comes out of the Collaborative Arts MA I did at Trent. Even though I was doing a lot of stuff beforehand, it really allowed me to start working with theatre and dance people. I did an undergraduate course at Newcastle - fine art, painting, sculpture. It was very much about being in a studio working through your angst to get this painting out. I did a year or two of sculpture and then went into painting. I was uncomfortable with the whole thing really. I realised when I was there I was a picture-maker more than a three-dimensional person. But to be honest I liked computers. I used to feel like every project was critiqued about quality of line and mark making and all this business. I remember getting into drawing on computers just to avoid the quality issue; the line was one pixel thick, wherever it was on the page it would be one pixel thick. I just enjoyed working in drawing that way. I became a graphic designer for a few years and then realised I had little interest in the commercial work. But it was then that I VJ’d more drum and bass nights over at Lenton. That was using just slide projectors; crappy mechanical things that would fall apart and overheat and melt… it was great fun!

How do your overcome the authorship issue, using found footage made by someone else - do you have any dilemma about it?
It depends who I’m working for, really. When it comes to the VJing side of it, I haven’t got a problem with cutting up films that people know because it is just sampling, like musical sampling. You're chopping it up and re-contextualising it. As long as you are not sitting there and playing the whole thing, I haven’t got a problem with that at all.