Guerilla projection & video art

I used to do visuals in night clubs. I didn’t call myself a video artist yet… But I was the guy in NYC. I pretty much owned my spot in all of Peter Gatien’s clubs – it was the new golden age of nightlife in New York City and it got me tons of exposure. I kept most of my gear in Limelight (and slept in my cubby hole there since I performed from thursday-sunday), and had some homies staffing The Tunnel, Palladium, etc. I also showed my live video work in other spots such as Shelter and at countless warehouse parties in Brooklyn and Queens. I had no competition, at arguably one of the most electric times in arguably the most electric city – it was the end of punk, the boombap days of hiphop, pre-social club task force. I’m grateful for the timing.

I live mixed video on Commodore Amiga’s, and borrowed money to buy my Sony VPx1000 3gun RGB projectors. LCD projectors were too new at the time and sucked for brightness and resolution. My lower back and biceps were probably diesel as hell from constantly lifting my heavy ass 3gun projectors. By this time, I was being called a ‘video artist’ by others and started getting flown around the world.. Remember, most everyone was still doing analog video editing and I was out here jamming on video from scsi hard drives. It was the newnew and I was way ahead of the curve. The only other guys on the same tip was a multimedia band known as EBN (Emergency Broadcast Network). Peep the embed below. One other dude went by the name Madame Chao (video below) who played his stuff on BCAT (Brooklyn cable access) and MCAT (Manhattan) in the late 90’s, although he may have been editing on tape, unsure. Still, his work was both demented and wholly intriguing to me.

Even though I was getting invited to tour with the likes of the late great Ornette Coleman, and doing video sculpture for the late great David Bowie, I was still that early 90’s Brooklyn graffiti kid at heart. High end video projectors started to appear in the early 2000’s and I was getting paid to do ‘guerilla projection’ for brands… Well, on their dime, I’d rent the gear and go out projecting my tag all around NYC. I wrote software that let me control ‘corner pin distortion’, also known as 2d Homography, via a MIDI control surface usually used for music. This way I could use 9 sliders (usually meant for mixing volume) as controls for X and Y pixel positioning of each of 4 corners of video and images. This allowed me to quickly make video look ‘correct’ projected from really harsh angles out of a mini van parked on the street. I was probably the first to be projecting my tag 6 stories tall every weekend outside of parties.

Occasionally, cops would come over to see what’s up… They never gave me trouble. They’d ask if I could hook up a playstation or put on whatever sports game was going on in those days 🙂