D-Fuse: Cold Fusion
Musicians perform at concerts and artists exhibit their work in galleries. It’s just the way things are done, the standard modes of artistic presentation. London studio D-Fuse, however, demolishes those conventions. They mash live performances with art openings, fusing improvisation with carefully crafted visual art to create explosive shows and impressive displays. “We don’t feel constrained to one particular style and we like to explore things from a conceptual point of view,” says Keri Elmsly, D-Fuse producer. “You could say our work is graphically led, but juxtaposed with an incredibly cinematic feel.”
D-Fuse doesn’t limit itself to any one graphic style or artistic mode. The firm has designed and crafted record album covers, print ads, TV commercials, art installations, DVDs, and live VJ shows. They mix media — video, motion graphics, still imagery, and music. And they do it with Macs. “Apple computers free you up from constraints,” says Elmsly. “The technology has evolved so rapidly in the last six or seven years that we’ve been able to expand our playing field and express the creative ideas that we’ve wanted to.”
The D-Fuse team has worked with BMW, Nike, Beck, Nokia Trends, The London Symphony Orchestra, Fujitsu, and many other musicians, corporations, and museums. Their latest project, a 200-page tome called “VJ: Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture” is a comprehensive collection of audio-video techniques and stories bound together in one paperback volume. It is an overview of VJ culture and methods and a detailed how-to guide, exploring D-Fuse and other artist projects and the high-tech methods behind them. It is, in a sense, the D-Fuse magnum opus. It’s also the impetus for a digital media revolution, a plan of attack for artists across the globe. “It’s a book about the audio-visual culture,” says Mike Faulkner, artist and co-founder of D-Fuse. “About 130 artists were interviewed and we discuss the history of the VJ movement, sampling culture and peoples’ setups. The book explains everything we do.”
Breaking Barriers
To comprehend what D-Fuse does, it helps to understand the studio’s tendency to push technology to the extreme. For example: One of its DVDs, Beck’s “Guero,” is so advanced that it could send basic DVD players into spasmodic tantrums. “It is a technically challenging DVD and the record company knew that it was actually going to break some DVD players,” says Elmsly.
Viewers can pick and choose how they want to watch the DVD, giving them access to about 106 different iterations. “We were able to interpret Beck’s music how we chose,” says Elmsly. “It was an incredibly creative process for us. We were delivered music by Beck; we’d deliver some films back to him in a rough edit. He was very supportive and didn’t change anything.”
D-Fuse spliced all the disparate visuals together for “Guero” using Final Cut Pro. “Final Cut is our main tool basically,” says Faulkner. “It is such a logical program — it’s so much like swimming or running. It’s got hidden depths as well. We can mix motion graphics from Adobe After Effects, stills from Photoshop, sound from Logic. Its capabilities are just fantastic.”
Producing “Guero” was labor intensive and difficult, but this type of work is old hat for the team. They released their first DVD, called “D-Tonate,” in 2004. The piece was a mélange of motion graphics, video, and still images based on sharing media. D-Fuse created a series of video and graphics clips, then sent them out to favorite music artists like Ken Ishii, Scanner, Funkstorung, and Kid 606. The musicians cut tracks for the D-Fuse visuals and the D-Fuse team wove it all together on a single DVD. It was the precursor to “Guero” and featured multiple layers that could be randomly accessed, creating a sort of live performance in viewers’ living rooms. The DVD was a good representation of a D-Fuse live show, which is usually a spectacle that defies description.
