Taking a critical position in live-cinema discourse

Every working AV performer eventually has to say what their practice is — to a festival curator, a funding panel, a promoter, or a collaborator deciding whether you get billing or a corner behind the mixing desk. This module builds toward that moment: an artist statement, written and delivered aloud, that stakes a defensible position in the live debates of the field. Whether you code visuals for a techno night or build seated theatre pieces, the same fault lines run through your work, and the statement forces you to pick sides with reasons.

The arc starts supported: first map the terrain using the Makela-versus-Harris dispute over whether narrative is a resource or a constraint, paired with the contextual prescription that clubs demand atmosphere while theatres sustain focused attention. A useful early exercise is to argue both sides of that pairing before committing. Next, claim your lineage: the framings of expanded cinema as expanded consciousness and of paracinema as cinematic properties realized without film give you the theoretical warrant to call laptop-and-projector work “cinema” at all, while the hybrid-practice framing (opera’s gesture, painting’s craft, the concert’s presence) shows how to place yourself in the intermedia tradition. Finally, confront the political questions — the unresolved art-versus-party status of VJing, the gap between the ideal of true AV dialogue and the reality of visuals following the music, and the visual-wallpaper trap of competing with rather than complementing sound.

Each required atom gates a clause of the statement; skip one and that clause collapses into assertion without argument. The supporting atoms — the structurally collaborative nature of VJing, the audience-participation spectrum, software-as-instrument, levels of real-time, and practice beyond clubs onto facades — widen the frame and sharpen examples, but the capstone stands without them.