Franz Keller, aka VJ Franz K, will be performing this Friday night from 7 – 9 PM as part of the 3rd Friday North Pine Experimental Music Series, which takes place in the Bungalow Building’s Mondo Cinema Screening Room, located at 729 Pine Avenue. First, he’ll be accompanying Nick Dynice, aka N.Sputnik, then sharing a solo set.

Keller is a visual performance artists whose medium is light or, more specifically, projected video. He’s performed at clubs all over the Southland, in the Bay area and at Burning Man. He’s also accompanied artists at Hans Fjelstad’s ResBox series at the Steve Allen Theater in LA, and performed at the Levis Film Workshop at MOCA.

The raw material for Keller’s performances are snippets of video, computer animation, and images that he combines, in real time, with a variety of effects and transitions. He creates the majority of these building blocks himself and, in doing so, has established a complex artistic language and an immediately identifiable visual style.

“As long as I can remember,” said Keller, “I have been a visual artist. I was lucky to be introduced to the first wave of consumer computers as a child, and was facinated with the possibilities there.

“In high school, I wanted to be a director of animated films, an ambition I have still not abandoned, and got to continue that in more of a ‘character and story’ driven direction. I took some classes at UCLA’s Film School, but ended up being accepted into the ‘graphic design’ program. It was, shortly thereafter, renamed Digital Media Arts because that was the dawn of digital video, interactive animation, etc.

“At this time I was also getting into making electronica – a growing trend in music at that time – and so naturally I started to do animations synchronized with the music. My first instrument was a computer, rather than a guitar or piano.

“I often state 2003 as the year when I became a VJ, because I did my first videos for a concert, and a video installation for an art show. One was a large, multi-style concert – rock jam bands to electronica – that my friends and I did at an art/music venue called 51 Buckingham in the Pomona Arts Colony. I was using self-coded VJ software to do something very simple, but it really got me thinking about the future.

“The second was a large, multi-venue art show called, interestingly enough, ‘Envisioning The Future’, curated by famed feminist artist Judy Chicago, where I 3D rendered an animated DVD loop that played 24/7 in the window of the Latino Art Museum (then in Claremont) for a month or two! This included a live electronic music performance that I did at the opening, and again got me thinking: How can I make this more improvisational, more performance oriented, in projects to come?

“I got my own projector, a very important step, and a more powerful computer, and was able to realize that in the following years, especially during a time when I lived in the Bay Area and would often visit the Dimension 7 ‘Video Salon,’ a meeting of the minds interested in this type of thing, organized by VJ Culture and others. Also, I participated in ‘The Illuminated Corridor’ events in Oakland, which featured film and oil light performers along side the latest digital innovations!”

Keller appreciates the sense of community he’s found amongst VJs.

“There is always a bit of both collaboration and competition in an overpopulated creative zone as LA or SF is, but I have found VJ’s to be unusually cooperative people! They’re open to sharing knowledge, contacts, and collaborating spontaneously at gigs. Perhaps it is because the ‘silent VJ’ is, by nature, a collaborative creature. We are essentially jamming along with sound performers using instruments that play light! Also, perhaps because there are fewer VJ’s than musicians, we have to stick together, and it tends to be a fairly small community, united by the internet, throughout the world. The sharing spirit of Burning Man cannot be underestimated either. A large percentage of VJ’s are frequent participants.”

As Keller said, collaboration, sometimes planned and sometimes spontanious, is mother’s milk for VJs. One collaboration he found particularly meaningful was with the experimental folk band, Amps For Christ, which led to opening for Animal Collective at the El Rey Theater.

“That was an amazing experience, of course, and I ended up continuing to make a documentary of AFC with footage at their studio. One day, I happened to have my Electribe [a sampling drum machine made by Korg] with me and asked, ‘Why don’t we do a jam?’ It turned out so well that it is on the album ‘Every 11 Seconds.’ I was brought into the band for a time as a VJ as well as rhythm section. Very interesting collaborative environment. It did give me the chance to record as a ‘Rock Singer’ also, which is something I have never really done before!”

“Often I have been drawn into doing visuals more than sound because it is something different that I do that is not in competition with the other sound artists, but a collaberation. Still, since the age of 10, I have never stopped doing electronic music, and I plan to release a new DVD album around the end of 2012: 15 songs with music videos.”

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The Third Friday North Pine Experimental Music Series is co-sponsored by LVXEdge.com and the Long Beach Cinematheque.

To see many beautiful performances by Keller, visit his YouTube Channel.

Read an interview I did with Nick Dynice.