A couple of articles taken from EDIROL site entitled “The Art of the Worship VJ”
Part 1: Connecting with Visual Media
By Stephen Proctor – www.gi-inc.org
Archive for April, 2008
OK, so I started this blog under the title Christian VJ or Worship VJ, but I’mnot totally comfortable with these terms becuase the term VJ brings to mind club style visuals and in my experience this doesn’t work in worship services – unless your doing specifically DJ led worship or Dance/Club style worship which I’ve not seen much of recently (if it’s out there get in touch).
The other reaction the saying that you do Worship VJing is a blank look. So I figured that I’d take the term ‘Visualist’ which some club VJs and visual artists use and call myself (at least for this blog) a Christian Visualist.
The term is starting to grow on me and sounds less pretentious when I thought about it this way.
In a worship set a pianist or guitarist by playing their instrument adds to the overall sound mix, the Visualist ‘plays’ the visual mixer (hardware or software or mix of both) to produce a visual dimension to what is going on. Aslo, while this may be planned and scripted much like the musician following written music, there is more frequently a high degree of improvising going on during the worship set.
In some ways the term Worship Visualist might be better, but I had to choose one or the other for a blog title so that’s what I’ll stick to for now. I still like the terms “Christian VJ” and “Worship VJ” and would be interested in doing more of club style mixing but, to fit the praise/ worship atmosphere it is very infrequent that you can get away with fast paced cuts and mixes.
30
Apr
08
How did I start doing this?
What started for me as simply running powerpoint to provide song words with suitable images has developed into using the same sort of equipment that a VJ might use in a club setting to mix custom made images during a ‘normal’ Christian worship service.
Wikipedia currently defines a VJ as “A VJ is a performance artist who creates moving visual art (namely video) on large displays or screens, often at events such as concerts, nightclubs and music festivals, and usually in conjunction with other performance art. This results in a live, multimedia performance that can include music, actors or dancers as well as live and pre-recorded video.” wikipedia article
Visually intensive worship services are often thought of in the Alt-Worship or emergent worship side of the Christian world, which is a good thing. I’ve been lucky/blessed (delete as feel comforatable) to be able to use visuals in what is basically a mainstream worship services.
I have also been involved in larger Christian conferences and events and Youth events and occasionally even ‘traditional’ alt/emergent worship (if such a dichotomy can exist 
30
Apr
08
Why start this blog?
My aim here, given time, is to post my thoughts on why artistically, theologically and even historically speaking visual stimulus during worship is another way to connect with God. Talk about how to do this from both a practical and spiritual perspective.
I will aslo try to document some events from this visual point of view, why we concentrated on one image over another, how people reacted (if at all ). This will be as much for my own use as anything else but I do hope it will be of interest to others, because I don’t see much around about this sort of thing.
Hopefully there are others around who are looking for more visually stimulating worship services than staring at a projector screen with white words on a black background.
