Film-making has always been in my blood. My father is a director, so I started making films as early as grade school. For the last eight years, I have been editing commercials for clients such as Pepsi, Cheetos, GE and Domino's, at a NYC a post house called Crew Cuts. Working at CrewCuts has been an amazing learning experience and I’ve gained invaluable exposure to hi-end filmmaking. Artistically, however, my work as an editor has been creatively stifling due to the limiting nature of main-stream commercial work. You get to be creative with the footage you have and with how you approach a cut, but ultimately, you can't do anything very far outside the box, i.e. anything that might be artistically daring. This is where my interest in Live Video Mixing came from: it was the antithesis of what I'd been doing for a living. Rather than dealing with very frame-accurate, hi-end, narrative, product-specific work, I got to do real-time, free form, down-and-dirty improvisational video performance for art’s sake. It was an amazing artistic release and a chance for me to experiment visually. Every show is different and unique, depending on the performers, Carlo and the crowd. The other thrill is the crowd feedback; I never get to see peoples' reactions to my national commercial work, but with my VJ sets, I get instant reactions.

So you just got off of the Ultra Music Festival where you mixed for nine hours straight, how do you find maintain your interest to mix that long?

Well, I did take two short breaks, but my sets did total nine hours. There are two things that keep all my mixes fresh and interesting for me: The first is Carlo de Jesus, my live camera guy and the second is the music itself.

Carlo is the other half of my performance team. Armed with a Panasonic DVX-100 DV camera, he sends me a continuous live feed of the performers, the crowd or even myself. He doesn't shoot like a traditional camera man, because wide static performance shots aren’t ideal for my mixing. Carlo has developed a unique shooting style that consists of snap zooms, whip pans, rapid dutches and other visually interesting camera tricks all matched to the beat of the music. Over at my VJ rig, I take Carlo's live camera feed, drop effects on it, sample it and combine it with my arsenal of original clips. Simultaneously, Carlo is monitoring my output while he shoots, and varies his feed depending on how I am using it. We've been working together for a year and a half, and our artistic interaction is very well-oiled at this point. He knows what I'll tend to do with his feed depending on how he shoots, and consequently gives me footage that will be the most useful depending on the mood of the music and the performer.

The other thing that helps keep my long mixes going and my shows interesting is the live music. Working with such an extensive and varied collection of amazing bands, DJs and performers gives me a fresh stream of inspiration. The music at Ultra was particularly great: I got to do visuals with Armand Van Helden, Benny Benassi, Junior Sanchez, DJ Dan, Badboy Bill, Seb Fontaine and several others. They kept the energy high and the crowd moving which was sheer motivation to keep an epic set going.

What is Uncomun all about?

UNCOMUN is a monthly party I've been curating with my partners at Nolej for over two years now. It's a multi-media artist showcase, featuring live performers, DJs, dancers, short film screenings and --of course -- VJs. Besides being a great party, it has been a wonderful training ground for me, as Carlo and I produce visuals for every performer that graces the stage. Since we change the line-up every month, I have gotten to work with dozens of different bands ranging in style from Reggae to Rock to Hip Hop to Folk. At a few UNCOMUN’s I brought out other VJs and collaborated, tag-teaming with VJ Malaki from Peru and WIlliamsburg's own VJ Whitelite. We do the show monthly, the next one is at the end of March, you can check out our website, UNCOMUN for more info.

How do you feel your directorial experience influences your VJ work?

I think that my extensive film-making background, including both my directorial and editorial experience, have given me a very high personal standard for my VJ work. Being accustomed to top-notch film and effects, I want my live visual work to be of the same caliber.

Like any good director, I want my work to carry a unique stamp; my personal visual flair should be immediately evident. I am still not satisfied with how my visuals look. They are getting better, and my performance is getting close to where I'd like it to be, but the vision I have in my head has not been fully realized yet.

How do you see the importance of the VJ and performance taking shape in the next few years?

I think one of the hardest things about the role of VJs and live visuals is that it is still considered a “great unknown”; society /club owners/ audiences don’t fully understand the concept, much less grasp the genre’s full potential. I'm an active VJ with a solid understanding of live video, and it has taken me the last few years to find my niche as a video artist and have my own performance take shape.

Many people today don’t remember, but this was the plight of DJs two decades ago. Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" came out and society was finally able to comprehend the relationship between a DJ physically scratching a record and the sound that was produced; people suddenly "got it". The hasn’t happened with live video yet, a bolt of lightning hasn’t struck the masses. People come up to me all the time during sets or after a show who think I'm a DJ and make requests. At the end of Ultra, the local Police came up and demanded that I turn off my music, because we were past our curfew. They were totally boggled when I tried to explain that I couldn’t do anything about it since I was "just the video guy".

I think a lot of the misunderstanding and mystery surrounding what VJs do is fed by the VJs themselves. They tend to perform in some dark, shadowy corner or behind the stage: somewhere where the audience cannot see them or relate to what they are doing. To do my part to dispel the mystery and to show people that video can be manipulated live just as sound can, I have been actively performing my sets. Instead of setting up far from the stage, I situate myself as close or even next to the performer. I have one of my video screens near me so people can associate me with the art I am creating. When the music starts I launch into my set with a physical passion, accentuating my gestures and working into a berserker-like performance. Not only is it much more interesting for the audience to watch, but it is immensely more satisfying for me. Stage antics aside, Vjs need to increase their visibility and treat themselves like the artists and performers they are. You wouldn’t put your drummer on the onther side of the room in a dark booth, why put the VJ there? I’d rather perform on the floor by the audience, rather than in some secluded DJ booth.

What does your setup consist of?

I use two Mac G4 powerbooks: one running Livid Union (my effects
computer) and one running Grid. I have an Apple iSight firewire camera feeding into the Union computer, which I use either pointed at my monitor for a live feedback loop, or at my hands to create abstract textures. I use a M-Audio Triggerfinger and a FaderFox LV 1 as midi controllers for the livid computer (to trigger clips and drive efx, respectively). For the Grid computer, I use a M-audio O2 as a midi controller and both computers use external Lacie Pocketdrives for source clips. I have both computers, a tiny Mintek DVD player, and Carlo's Panasonic AGDVX-100A camera all feeding into an Edirol V4 video mixer. I then take the output from the V4 and feed that into a Korg Entrancer so I can drop live effects on it before it goes out to the final output.

Equally important to my hardware/software set-up are my original content clips. Unlike a lot of VJs who steal clips from archival footage, movies or the web, all the clips I use are shot or created by myself or my friends. I shoot a lot of clips around NYC, as well as when I travel. I also comb through the tapes from Carlo's live feed and pull out any gems in there. Creating all your own clips is a lot of work, and it's taken me a long time to compile a decent sized library. The payoff is that no one else’s show could ever look exactly like mine. When I'm projecting, it's truly 100% my art

For more about Nate Taylor visit www.fullstealth.com