Ambientação do vídeo em festas e festivais: signos de Stimmung, atmosferas e ambiência

Abstract

“Ambientation” is the continuous, purposive, and effective mediation of the multimodal qualities creating a space of signs. Together with djs, musicians, set and light designers as well as the participating public, video jockeys (vjs) compose dance floor ambientations, while manipulating and projecting audiovisual content in real time. This study adopts a semiotic approach in the inquiry into the strategies through which vjs create ambientations in their performances by means of live visuals and soundscapes. Nine parties, shows, and festivals from 2011 to 2016 are the object of detailed semiotic and multimedia analyses. Part 1 describes the data, exemplifies the variety of vjing scenarios, and identifies live performance, synaesthetic effects, and collage as the three principal strategies of creative practice. Part 2 introduces H. Gumbrecht’s theory of the production of presence in light of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics. It distinguishes six dimensions of presence that transform a dance floor into a creative semiotic space: (1) Stimmung (free possibilities of attunement), (2) mood (materialized quality), (3) atmosphere (or mood chaining), (4) the environment (movement in the atmospheres), (5) “scapes” (limitations and perceptual restrictions in the environment), and (6) ambience (patterns regulating atmospheric transitions). During a live video fruition, ambientation creates tensions oscillating between effects of presence (contact and rhythm) and effects of sense (intellectual depths and meanings). On the dance floor, vjs mobilize sensory qualities and combine them with actions and habits. They build a universe of Stimmungen from which all participants in the performance, immersed and surrounded in ambientation, are free to choose and create their own semiosic helix. The general effects of the event are commotion, emotive condition, and energetic reaction, together with effects of meaning