Ten years ago, electronica’s capabilities as a live art were limited to mostly crude novelties: first adding keyboard effects to prerecorded music on DAT; then inserting preplanned sequencing loops live to laptop-driven music. “But with software like Ableton’s LIVE, it makes it easier to say: ‘Okay, I have this beat and this loop or sound, let’s put them together, right now,’” Hoffman explains. “The computer is fast enough nowadays; the crucial thing is that it all works in real-time.” Hardware-software combinations like Final Scratch-Traktor FS allow DJs to network together MP3s on laptop or iPod, sequencer loops, CDs, and old-school wax and manipulate everything manually —whether by scratching or by madly twisting knobs and levels on a mixing board.

The urge to improvise electronic music live in some ways resembles the current trend among designers to use computers to make tactile, handmadelooking images. In both cases, “perfect” computer-generated art feels cold until an improvised, rough-edged touch awakens its expressive power. On the visual side of things, VJs like Monitor.Automatique, Bauhouse, Visual Kitchen, and Lillevan are matter-of-factly blurring all kinds of creative divides. Their work fills crumbling post-Communist dance clubs and philharmonic halls alike; as designers, they move easily between traditional design work and improvised VJ/DJ sets. The imagery ranges from film reels and still photography to mad animations and abstract shapes and colors. Timm Ringewaldt and Sven Gareis are great-granddaddies in the VJ world, having collaborated as Monitor.Automatique since 1996. (They’ve recently separated to pursue independent projects: Ringewaldt as Autokolor and Gareis as Telematique.) “We work with a combination of self-programmed software tools and analog video hardware,” says Timm. “Our style is inspired by pop art and Cubism, but also by the aesthetics of surveillance camera images,” he continues. “We’re constantly trying to reinforce the connection between the people present and the place where the event takes place.” Since many VJ events happen in historically loaded sites like Café Moskau, a former Stasi hideout in East Berlin, surveillance images give their work a feeling both intensely human and unsettling.

Their VJ set Alexanderplatz GTI offers a powerful example of how this process works. The loop begins with a panorama of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, an iconic image of Communist squalor and one of the few such places to survive the massive reconstruction obliterating most traces of the East’s past. The panorama broadens and syncopates to music. Shadows tip and bend back, cars skitter in the parking lot, then the bottom of the frame bleeds into stripes of color, distortions of the scene above. Soon the stripes orchestrate these scenes in uncanny ways. A band of horizontal stripes feeds a new picture piece by piece into place: Karl-Marx-Allee, formerly Stalinallee and scene of the 1953 worker’s riots, now simply a major traffic artery. The music is moody, introspective, sexy in its restraint, building to unseen ends. Scene after scene reprise East Berlin with its many layers: brutal, nostalgic, disappearing under twiddling construction cranes. The loop ends with the East Berlin TV tower, another quintessential image. The silvery ball of its observation deck hangs in full blue sky, which rapidly darkens until a band of palely lit windows blink out. Watching Monitor.Automatique’s work, you get a hint of the immersive power of music and images interacting, a sound-landscape that invites you to lose yourself in sight, sound, detail, and movement. Marcel Duchamp, a true king of the cut-and-paste, nailed it when he said, “The only thing that is not art is inattention.”