(2006) FLOWERS Abstractions of videographed images of Brooklyn Botanical Gardens & Burle Marx Gardens Length: 6:00. Original Format: DV (live VJing recording/editing)
Live videoart performance of Zodiac Wheel of Fortune at Monkeytown, Brooklyn, New York.
(2006) DISAPPOINTMENT Music Video for electronica artist MONTA AT ODDS
Finalist at VI Queens International Film Festival, New York. Best Music Video category.
The following five videos were commissioned by DVJ Vision DVD series and made especially for DJ’s and VJ’s working with beat-synched dancefloor environments. These visuals can also be performed as long-format live iterations during my own VJ sets while I DJ or in support of musicians’ shows.
(2007) OP, MOD, POP Inspired by 1960’s Op, Pop, and Mod Art
Length: 6:00. Original Format: DV (CGI and live VJing recording)
(2005) HEATWAVES Basic shapes manipulated and extrapolated using time delay
Length: 7:00. Original Format: DV (CGI/live VJing recording/editing)
(2008) ZODIAC WHEEL OF FORTUNE Interactive live VJ performance
Length:20:00 Original Format: DV (Animation/CGI)
Zodiac Wheel of Fortune is a videoart piece which plays on the juxtaposition of astrology as a pseudo-science subjected to a game of chance. The game aspect of the work comes from the actual Zodiac Wheel of Fortune gadget believed to have the same properties as the luck-enhancing fan used by Feng Shui masters to transform bad luck into good luck.
The 12 signs of the zodiac are represented with their pertaining symbolism and astrological information for an ethereal journey composed of live visual manipulations and music. Working with the four basic elements - Fire, Earth, Air, and Water as backgrounds for a visual game, deeper elements of astrology are explored as subsequent layers in the composition are added to the mix. As the composited layers get more deeply stacked, each zodiac sign takes shape and meaning.
Zodiac Wheel of Fortune was created as a pseudo-interactive videoart piece first presented at Forward Motion Theater’s Eyewash event at Monkeytown, an immersive videoart space in New York City. The interactive element of the performance determined the order in which the astrological signs were presented. The audience members entering the room were asked their astrological signs. These were tabulated and the performance worked its way down from most to least like-signs of audience members.
(2007) POP WILL EAT ITSELF Live videoart performance / 4-Channel Installation
Length: 60:00. Year of first presentation: 2006. New York City.
In a globalized world, where cultural products are avidly exported and imported everywhere, Pop will eat itself.
From TERRAS EM TRÂNSITO program curator Karyn Riegel (Cinema Tropical):
Born in Rio de Janeiro and transplanted to New York, interdisciplinary artist Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez mines diverse found materials in a live dissection of American pop and visual imperialism. Pop Will Eat Itself, an ongoing media project, moves from Warhol to Walmart, signs to insignificance, and fashion to fascism. Multi-channel distensions of “pretty vacant” imagery generate a potent inversion of Allan Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “America”-”America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing...” to “America, I’ve given you nothing, and now I’m all.” Set to the hybrid rhythms and appropriated psychedelia in Brazil’s Tropicalia, the artist’s manipulations also reflect the analogy and practice of anthropophagia, a Brazilian avant-garde from the 1920s that resonates from the 60s to today; cannibals devour international influences and colonizers, which are digested and transformed into new, critical expressions.
See FILM: AMERICA which was integrated in this videoart installation/performance
(2008) CELESTIAL DISCO A pulsating explosion of motion graphics in celestial space
Length: 7:00. Original Format: DV (CGI and live VJing recording)
(2010) BUTTERFLIES A whimsical colorful life journey of a butterfly
Length: 7:00. Original Format: DV (CGI)
Video for recording artist Silvershower (Ian Pooley) for his EP release Early Fever.
2011. Record Label: M-NUS/Richie Hawtin.
(2013) SÍSIFO /SISYPHUS
Videoart in collaboration with Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo.
Sisyphus is a video in loop inspired by Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus - a philosophical essay on the Absurd. Anthropomorphic ice sculptures melt and pulsate in a continuous process of reconstruction - appearing and disappearing - set to the sound of a heartbeat and breathing. The visual source is the urban intervention work by Néle Azevedo "Monumento Mínimo", recorded at the Municipal Theatre in São Paulo. Sísifo is conceptualized to be video-projected onto a curtain of steam whose support gives it a singularity in the interpretation of the Sisyphus myth - divested of the materiality of stone and earth, Sisyphus gains ephemeral dematerialization. He goes through the three stages of the water element - solid: ice, liquid: melting, and gaseous state: vapor.
(2012) A•LIVE
An excursion into live videomicrography where visual and aural elements share DNA and the organic and synthetic merge. Music composition by Derek Holzer.
A•LIVE premiered as live audiovisual performance at The Paseo festival in Taos, New Mexico, USA in September of 2015. An experimental precursor to this performance took place at Lichtblick Kino, Berlin in September of 2012. In between this time period, a potent and portable microscope was hacked into, becoming an audiovisual instrument with which to create micrographic live video showing organic and synthetic matter devouring each other in the process of encounter, an allusion to the theme of Anthroppophagy in my works. The linked electroacoustic frequencies of sound artist Derek Holzer co-affect the particles on the microscope table.
2-D prints are also part of this work.
Short excerpt of VJ/DJ set. 2011.
Video source for installation: a 3-min. videoart piece. 2013
Videodocumentation of videoinstallation at Espaço Vitrine, São Paulo. 2016.
(2012) LIVE VJ SESSIONS
Screen shots of videomicrography (4x lens) from live videoart performance at Platoon, Berlin.
