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Dutch artmagazine XPO interviewed Veejays.com businessleader Hidde Kross and Frouke ten Velden (VJ F) about VJing, and the question en de vraag of het meer is dan alleen eye candy.

Read the complete interview here.

VJ VeeMee (Michelle van Mil) of VeeMee Visuals is besides VJ at Veejays.com, also board member! VeeMee is allround VJ and designer since 2010, with a background in animation and illustration (AKV St. Joost 2010).

Sudevi (junior marketer) visited her to hear the ins and outs at VeeMee Visuals.

Nienke Mink (1990) graduated at the VjAcademy in 2017. She loves to mix different media techniques, which makes her a true allrounder. In 2013, Nienke graduated as Motion Designer at the HKU, Image and Media Technology.

The day after Nienke’s exam at the VjAcademy, Sudevi (junior marketer) visited her.

Our VJs are resident VJs at FRIS parties. These parties are meant for children between the ages 12 and 16.
The parties are given all around The Netherlands, in this way they give every child the opportunity to party in a responsible way!

This time VJ Shurly (Henk Nijman) was working at Het Paard van Troje in The Hague. Sudevi (junior marketer) paid him a visit. Henk works in Zutphen as a motion designer and VJ.  His projects are centered around abstract, often vibrantly colored 3D-animations.

In this video/vlog you see how the VJ experiences the night!

To graduate as a VJ at or VjAcademy you need to create an original, personal video project.  This year, for the first time, our students presented their final exam work at the EYE Film museum, within the “Research Lab” program. Research Lab consists of two one-day expositions, and is collaboration between EYE and seven media/art academies. Robin van Creij won the Best Original Work jury prize with his Sentient Chandelier. 

Robin van Creij – Sentient Chandelier

Fabric suspended in steel frame, sensors, computer animations, digitally processed film footage, digital beamer, stereo boxes.

Robin van Creij (1991) is doing his final exam on both St. Joost as VjAcademy in 2017, as a video animation designer and VJ.

In this VJ installation, Robin van Creij makes these Bits and Pieces shine once again. They no longer need further context, a story or an explanation as they become a part of a decorative piece of furniture. The installation is an irregular sculpture of bits and pieces of material, onto which the film fragments are projected. This interactive ‘chandelier’ generates and reflects projections of the lost and found footage. The behaviour of people nearby is picked up by sensors and translated into the display of certain fragments and an array of special effects to transform their appearance.

Usually during a concert, a VJ’s audience has limited and only indirect influence on the projections. In the best case scenario, the expression of their mood is observed by the VJ and taken into account in the evolving vibe of his live show. In classic cinema interactivity is even practically zero. At home however, Netflix gives the viewer full control over the second-by-second replay of an enormous library of cinema. In this project that level of interactivity -now with Bits and Pieces of cinema content transformed to VJ content- is brought to the same livingroom. The viewer becomes the VJ and creates his personal esthetic VJ experience.

Jury Award: Best original work

“The prize of the best original work was attributed to Robin van Creij (VJ Academy and AKV|St.Joost) for his installation Sentient Chandelier. Using the Bits & Pieces from the EYE archives as source material, Robin created an installation that artistically played with the concept of the ‘fragment’ in a 3-dimensional work that is playful, interactive and communicative. The realization of the work was carefully done with great attention for detail and quality. The Sentient Chandelier is imaginative and highly original and is exemplary for artistic use of archival footage to create new meanings and experiences. The jury considered this especially interesting in the context of EYE as an institute for the promotion and presentation of archive films. This installation therefore coincides very well with the objectives and framework of EYE.”

Serina Giesbers – The Box

Cardboard and wood, computer animations,  digitally processed film footage, digital beamers, stereo boxes.

Serina Giesbers (1991) works as a 3D-artist and VJ. She’s interested in combining innovative 3D-software and hardware with traditional filmed imagery.

Inside The Box a sculpture is imprisoned, aching for freedom, longing to break its boundaries. A confrontation is inevitable, as these boundaries don’t intend to let anything pass just like that. Unwielding gatekeepers, these physical limitations are intent on keeping their treasure inside, and are willing to go all-out in the upcoming struggle.

The Box is a cube situated in one of the corners of the exhibition space. Projections reveal both the nature of the The Box, and what’s inside. The fight between inside and outside is visualised in an array of optical illusions and effects. Once the sculpture inside succeeds in breaking out, it rips apart its boundaries and manifest itself all over the wall in an intense audiovisual cry of triumph.

An intense and new experience is also what Serina Giesbers aims to offer the audience. She likes the idea that such experiences have dualistic nature: they exist only in a brief moment, yet they may leave a lasting impression. While looking for such experiences, are we trying to discover and explore our own world? Or are we trying to go beyond and to break free of our physical cage?

For this installation Serina Giesbers used the VJ technique of 3D projection mapping. It’s a clever way to employ geometry and knowledge of optical depth perception to seemingly change the surface of e.g. buildings or stage objects. Colors and textures can be manipulated in the blink of an eye, but even the entire shape of the structure can seem to change and move. Or escape!

Nienke Mink – Control of the Animal Kingdom

Digitally processed wildlife recordings, live music and video performance, projection with digital beamer.

Nienke Mink (1990) loves to mix many media approaches and techniques and is a true allrounder.

In her project, Nienke Mink wants to reinvent the way we watch wildlife documentaries. After a journey to South Africa, she found that traditional documentaries lacked something essential as compared to real nature: the unexpected. It’s linear narrative based structure has become rigid and predictable. Using VJ improvisation techniques, Nienke invites us to a more realistic, unscripted experience.

For this she teamed up up with DJ/composer/producer YNDIAN, creating a live audiovisual performance. She mixed the wildlife footage with matching EYE archive video samples. Abstract computer graphics challenge the organic nature of the imagery during this performance. The same contrast is found in the electronic music by YNDIAN, which incorporates the sounds of traditional African music.

This approach not only disrupts the format of the documentary, but also of VJ-ing. Wildlife documentaries imply an experience convention that is close to cinema: the viewer sits down and spends thirty minutes or more in focussed attention watching a linear narrative. The music score, regardless of its quality, is very much secondary. This is in sharp contrast with the usual VJ experience: music first, no linear narrative, no focussed attention of the audience on the images. What happens if you set both senses on equal footing attention-wise? A dangerous journey into the unknown for both artists…

Henk Nijman – Between Nothing and Nothing 

Computer animations, digitally processed film footage, music track, projection with digital beamer. Audio by Julian Theelen and Ivo Statinski.

Henk Nijman (‘Shurly’, 1983) works in Zutphen as a motion designer and VJ. His projects are centered around abstract, often vibrantly colored 3D-animations.

Between Nothing and Nothing is all about perspective. Can you be or mean something, anything of substance in the perspective of the vastness of time and space? To find out, Henk Nijman wants to immerse the audience in a hallucinating visualisation of the birth and death of the cosmos. The piece is a journey through time in abstract computer generated images entwined with parts of EYE’s Bits & Pieces collection.

It starts in a totally dark room in which one senses nothing at all except for one’s own being. No sound, no light, just darkness. From this darkness a sound will be slowly penetrating the ears, and while one may wonder what it could be, a tiny touch of light enters the room. The slowly increasing sounds are accompanied by ever intensifying colors. The two appear to be intimately connected.

What are these sounds, what is the meaning behind these colors? The visitor will be guided, in an extraordinary way, both through sound- and lightwaves, from barren primordial nothingness to a time far in the future where nothing is left, with in between: pure imagination!

Ginna Mora – Biological: visual music

Computer animated illustrations, digitally processed film footage, synced live music and video performance, projection with digital beamer

Ginna Mora (1981), also known as ‘Synaesthesik’, is a graphic designer and visual artist who got her name in the Argentinian VJ scene in 2009.

Biological visual music explores the Synesthesia phenomenon through the music of techno producer ‘Biological’ and the translation of his music into moving images.

Three visual approaches together define the style of ‘Biological’: Microorganisms, Geometry and Technology. Organic and geometric compositions will dance on the screen in constant transmutation. The content is created with an amalgam of different audiovisual techniques and sources: motion graphics, EYE archive film (‘Daphnia’ and ‘Malaria’), and compositions made in a visual programming environment.

Ginna Mora uses a combination of DJ and VJ software to merge music and visuals into one composition, finding elements that both languages (music/visual) share, together creating a synchronized stimulation of ears and eyes. During the performance, the images are triggered in real time using Resolume, modulated and altered with effects by midi events sent through OSC from Ableton live.

• Meet our VjAcademy students: Robin, Serina, Nienke, Henk, Ginna
• More on EYE Museum and Research Lab
• More on Yndian
• More on Biological
• More on  Julian (Five Suns) and  Statinski

At the Bevrijdingsfestival 2017 performed a lot of famous artists, like De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig (who were ambassadors of freedom). There were also performances by Michel de Hey, The Cool Quest en Radio Eliza. But also our VJ Noralie (Noralie) and VJ F (Frouke ten Velden) were performing at the main stage.

Sudevi (junior marketer) visited the festival and made a vlog about it! In this vlog she will show you what it is a VJ does.

With the students of our VjAcademy, we visited the ISE exhibition on visual technology earlier this year. Here they discovered a crazy foto booth with dozens of cameras all around. Of course, the students couldn’t resist having their picture taken with this device. We left our mailadresses at the friendly Berlin staff and basicly forgot about it.

Mystery parcels

Weeks later, crazy pictures like this started filling our WhatsApp group. Moreover, our members were receiving mysterious parcels from Germany. Who created these awesome, highly detailed action figures of ourselves?

An instant 3D model of yourself

Off course, the ISE fellas were behind all this. They also sent us zip-files containing something even more awesome: the digital data that they used for the small statues. This is exactly what our students needed for their experiments and pranks. If you know what you’re doing, Cinema 4D software turns this data into virtual characters. This is way faster and more realistic than modeling a person from scratch, at least for medium sized projects (for blockbusters and major games, a lot more software and labour comes in).

Making it move

Our student Shurly (Henk) certainly does know what he’s doing. Apart from bending our virtual mini mees in impossible ways, and creating silly clone armies, he also gave the models rigging: a skeleton that alows the 3D models postures and movements.

On the technology

The German supplier of the action figures and the data is a company called Staramba. They fit 75-150 camera’s in a custom made 360 degrees photobooth. The cameras feed 18 MegaPixel images to a computer, to be  stitched together for use as textures in e.g. Cinema 4D. Also a stereo model is generated that gives you the 3 dimensional shape. Their business is primarily creating sandstone figurines of celebrities and the likes as fan merchandise, and selling entire photobooths plus software to 3D companies.

Learning more

Technology to scan real stuf and create digital 3D characters is not new or unique, but it is evolving rapidly. A stunning case by ManvsMachine creating amazing 3D animals based on stuffed ones can be seen here . Also, there are several tools for smartphones like Trnio, Scann3D and the Google Tango product line.

• More on the company Staramba
• Meet our students of VjAcademy
• More on 3D artist Henk aka Shurly

Happy 2017 everyone! Saying goodbye to 2016, let’s have a brief throwback-by-month of our VJ’s work:

• January: Bikkelamsterdam.nl kicks off a year contract with Encore, the Number 1 Urban act in the Netherlands for (almost) weekly performances in their top level downtown club in Amsterdam.
• February: VVision Impossible creates a stunning new dance show ‘Evolution’ for Artixium Ltd, who merged into the largest LED company in the world shortly thereafter.
• March: The class of 2017 graduates with 5 beautiful and exciting installations.
• April: Frouke, VISH, Eigengeis, Domi and Lars are working on new top productions in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
• May: l’Accent Grave performs in dozens of theaters and a new batch VjAcademy students is selected in our annual competition. treedt aan. De meest gestoorde tot nu toe, en dat wil wat zeggen!
• June: VJ Delight is our first Aircraft Jockey!
• July-August: Veemee (e.g. Untold) and 3DJL reign in the festival season, VJs like VJ Flirt, VJ Jayo Tony Mike Faber, Thomas de Kruif and Ivo MulderOare at their sides. But nothing beats our own Boot Camp in Belgium …
• September: Arts and Science Month! Frouke seals VjAcademy collaboration with EYE and Domi does another video production for the Ministry of Education.
• October: Our VJ’s are by far the most frequently booked at ADE, thanks to Ank1.
• November: VJ Sjush is the new darling of the Heineken Experience with 3 projects in eight weeks.
• December: Our very own Believe Your Eyes VJ Festival iand 10 year anniversary celebration welcomes nearly 400 visitors.

…and this is just a taste of the approximately 800 projects and performances by our VJ’s our VJ last year. See you soon!

UPDATE: 400 visitors made the event a big success: watch the after movie here.

Veejays.com, out collective of video artist exists 10 years! We’re celebrating with a unique visual program at the legendary Supperclub in Amsterdam.

Veejays.com is the biggest VJ collective of the Netherlands, and even Europe! Our academy, VjAcademy, with which it al started, is growing with new students every year.

To celebrate this we are hosting the ‘Believe Your Eyes Festival’ at December 15th 2016, a special club night at the famous Supperclub in the centre of Amsterdam. All our top VJs (like Noralie, Sjush , Bikkel , Jayo Tony , 3DJL and many more) will treat you with with an amazing 360 projection. Of course there’s a musical line-up as well, (in cooperation with Club 1036) with a mix of dance and electric DJs from Amsterdam.

Entrance is free for friends of Veejays.com and quick decision makers! Book a ticket at the festivalpage or check out our facebook-event.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Dutch.