Steve Gibson

During the 1980s and 1990s the aesthetics and practice of Live Visuals entered the mainstream, leading to better acknowledgement of the ‘Live Visuals performer’ as an important creative role. The rise of rave culture also created changes in audience experience – being in a large, disinhibited dance-focused crowd now demanded an alternative form of visual spectacle to replace the previous tradition of the stage as the place of visual focus. Simultaneously the growth in stadium-scale gigs also instigated the need to create more ambitious visuals, allowing Live Visual performers to work on larger-scale and visually more innovative productions.
These new contexts also provided live visualists new opportunities to present contemporary socio-political subject matter to their audiences; themes such as Thatcherism, Reaganomics, mass consumption and environmental degradation were commonly addressed within the audio-visual content of this period. Interestingly, while mass media was a site for their criticism, for some artists, it also became a channel through which they found a more mainstream voice – the prime example being through the creation of music videos that were then seen on MTV (as outlined in Chapter 3).
Developments in technology played an important role in driving these changes. The emergent media technologies of the VHS video, the Panasonic MX10 Digital Video Mixer and rudimentary computer-based video editing greatly facilitated new forms of creation and production. As is argued in Chapter 8, such experimental use of technology helped shape the visual aesthetic that emerged during this era. By reappropriating broadcast content on VHS tapes, irony and juxtaposition came to underpin the aesthetic; these approaches are also reminiscent of the ‘montage’ technique used by Sergei Eisenstein (as discussed in Chapter 2). By combining broadcast content with computer-generated graphics and text, visual artists could elect to be more narratively ambitious. Later hardware developments afforded better real-time computer processing, which when harnessed, allowed for the generation of ‘audio-responsive’ visuals. For Live Visual performers, the development of better interactive interfaces made it possible to utilise all the new advantages of desktop computers and software into their stage productions.
Parallel to these developments, the acid house movement began in Chicago in the mid-1980s and moved quickly to the UK, culminating with the “Second Summer of Love” in 1987.1 Acid house was a simple form of dance music, with a pulse that was driven by the iconic Roland TB-303 synth. Acid house fed directly into the establishment of rave culture, which was christened by former Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV singer Genesis P-Orridge in 1989.2 Rave usually consisted of illegal events in huge venues, where drugs were consumed and hedonistic dancing took place to electronic music. Though initially driven by acid house, other forms of electronic music such as drum and bass and techno became common at raves in the 1990s. The rave, while not always employing Live Visuals, often did have psychedelic qualities achieved through lighting that brought to mind the equally psychedelic events of the 1960s (see Chapter 3 for more on psychedelic events such as The Joshua Light Show’s performances and Chapter 11 for more on the hedonism of rave culture).
This chapter will select and discuss some of the most pioneering live-visual performers of the 1980s and 1990s as examples to illustrate what happened when culture was mediated through emerging technology. The chapter will begin in the UK with scratch video, stay in the UK to discuss rave culture, move to the United States to discuss Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) and then return to the UK to consider Coldcut.