While the DJs and VJs of the world remain tethered to the remix of sound and image, WJs (web jockeys) have at their fingertips an infinite and diverse pool of material–sound, image, text, code, web cams, blogs, and more–all constantly changing and expanding. A new software development, WJ-ss, offers artists a tool to create live multimedia performances from this digital soup. Last week at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, artists Agnès de Cayeux, Anne Laforet, and KRN used WJ-s to explore the erotic and heated atmosphere of video chat rooms, the world of artistic algorithms, and computer art in a live performance. WJ-s was conceived by Anne Roquigny and was launched in October with a workshop at Belgrade’s Dis_Patch Festival. The group proposes to create ‘a strong cybernetic experience, captivating, sensual, and shifted where [….] the flow and the extreme pleasure of surfing are moved into a performative framework.’ You can go with the flow at their next performance, scheduled for December 15th at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. – Helen Varley Jamieson.

http://www.wj-s.org