GABBA.TV is the studio of creative designer and audio visual performer Jaygo Bloom. The site is a show case for the many creative partnerships that his studio has been involved with, commissioned by private and public cultural institutions, for galleries, record labels, artists, nightclubs, festivals and events.
Since Y2K Jaygo Bloom has been pushing at the boundaries of 'live' art and design practice, disrupting and rethinking his approach to media in the production of cinematic, immersive, motion and sonic commissions for projects that include digital activism, graphical performance, vjaying, projection mapping, coded environments, identity, experimental publishing, photography, film, static image, installation and type.
The studio supports a practice that tends to enrich contemporary visual culture, advocating the need to listen, share and work together to produce experiences that take into account location and audience. The studio favours a unique graphic bias that serves the message to be communicated, challenges the zeitgeist and most of the time, finds relevant answers by asking the right questions.
Previous clients include: Franz Ferdinand, Philip Glass, Luke Slater, Mungos Hi Fi, Festival Forte, Time Warp, Pixelazo, Dekmantel, Berghain, Amnesia, Space, AgeHa, Fabric, Death Disco, The Southbank Centre, The Haywood Gallery, The VoiceLab Orchestra, The Dance House, Dundee Contemporary Art Centre, New Media Scotland, CCA Scotland, FutureEverything Festival, The Wrong Biennale, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Domino, Mote-Evolver, OstGut Ton and Kompakt records.
Interview by Art Critic Mathias Jansson. As part of a series to illustrate the genesis and evolution of a phenomenon that changed the way game-based art is being created, experienced, and discussed today.
Interview 01
Interview by NEoN Digital Arts Festival. Jaygo Bloom creator of ‘Bombaze’ an indie VR mobile app developed exclusively for the festival. In this interview we ask how it works, what it does, and what were his motives.
Interview 02
Interview by the V2 Institute for Unstable Media curator, Michelle Kasprzak. A discussion for the magazine Vague Terrain, on the subject of live expanded cinema and real-time graphical performance.
Interview 03
Interview for TALK Norwich, in conversation with students at Norwich University of the Arts. Presenting work and advice for emerging artists and designers on the importance of creativity and collaboration.
Interview 04
A live session with Jaygo Bloom sharing his experience of design and creative partnership with the Portuguese Electronic Art Festival - Festival Forte. In conversation with students of design multi media at Coimbra University, Portugal.
Art: Design: Identity
Festival Forte. Portugal, is an annual Electronic Art and Music event, dedicated to showcasing audio visual experimentation and generative narratives coordinated by a visionary collective of artists, musicians, artists, and architects, restless digital natives who refuse to be labeled and are dedicated to creating immersive social experiences.
Since 2016 Jaygo Bloom has held a creative partnership with the festival as art director, responsible for the direction, curation and development of the festivals art program and the realisation of generative social play areas. Each social area is defined by thematic guidelines that change with every festival edition, each space a hybrid of digital and analog production, autonomous, explorative and algorithmic in generation.
Each year 1000s of visitors from around the world experience a fluctuating and changing landscape of experimental artworks, alongside an impressive curatorial set of dark, restless techno and live visual performances, each setting the trend for future conversations between the digital and analog divide.
Performance
The 1st edition of Time Warp Brazil. 16000 people, 48 hours ..
No show, these days is just about the artist or the music or the look or the lights, what defines a great show is how all these different production values come together, it is about cleverly integrating the audio with the visual, the lights with the sounds, the music with the vibes. Immersive experiences at GABBA.TV is all about blurring the boundaries, disrupting the way we think and adapt to new experiences that are both analog and digital at the same time.
Cave 2.0 - AV live performance commission for the city of Sao Paulo, for a German production company and world leaders of international Techno Festival fame 'Time Warp'. The ambitious delivery for the Cave 2.0 was a high-tech conceptual proposal for futuristic event space installation, creating an immersive all-night experience. GABBA.TV was responsible for the generative post-apocalyptic live-visual content and responsive identity branding for the gigantic led main stage panel house within the Cave 2.0 - A mega club of dark and industrial settings under a cavernous ceiling.
Art: Identity: Performance
A creative partnership for Jaygo Bloom with the Scottish Art Rockers Franz Ferdinand.
It was 2003, and together with a few friends we founded a collective and rented out a dilapidated, city centre warehouse, appropriately named ’The Chateau’. We used this as a studio space and hosted art shows, performances, club nights and events, drawing on the artistic talent that visited the city via the Glasgow School of Art. The top floor was rented out by an edgy, four piece art rock band, they played at all our events held big parties and then literally, overnight became the phenomenon that is ‘Franz Ferdinand’.
Jaygo Bloom created and performed the video content for all Franz Ferdinand’s early acts, initially this was for the back rooms of pubs across the UK and as the band became more popular for larger venues, including taking on the role as AV creative director for the Franz' legendary gig at 'Heaven' Nightclub and the Franz Ferdinand Fright Night special with Kompakt Records at the O2 Academy in Brixton London.
It was in 2009 when the band invited GABBA.TV to develop and produce a series of super-wide visuals to accompany them on a massive World Tour, taking in Mexico, Japan, Russia, Colombia, USA, and cumulinating with a generation defining headline act, complete with GABBA.TV visuals, live on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival.
Art: Design: Identity: Performance
A GABBA.TV residency for the city of Glasgow and its seriously glamorous, dark and dirty, electro night club - 'Death Disco'.
Following the motif of Andy Warhol's Factory where it was possible for anyone to be famous for five minutes of their lives, our strategy for monthly club promotion and live video content was to invite dance floor players to a private photo and party session, encouraging them to perform and playfully engage with our cameras. The content captured at these bizzare parties became the monthly visual strategy for cliub promotion and the live club visuals.
The strategy was a success and we continued with the concept for more than three years, winning an award for the best marketing strategy in the Scottish Business Award Events.
Art: Design: Identity
Jaygo Bloom is resident designer for the Mote Evolver record label and its artists including Roog Unit, Psyk, LSD and Planetary Assault Systems.
Mote Evolver is the record label of DJ and producer Luke Slater. The label hosts musicians and artists who question the frontier areas of techno, dub and ambient. A common idea behind all the releases is an experimental approach and combination of sound, art and design, this is not only apparent in the music but also visible in the artwork, cover design and live performances.
The aesthetic focus of the collective label is rhythmic techno music, dark and alternating between sound landscape, frenetic detroit beats and un-nerving atmospheric introspection.
Art: Design: Interactive: Performance
Invited to present new work for the main gallery of the spectacular DCA building in Scotland. Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre, to coincide with the Discovery Film Festival. Jaygo Bloom presented the solo show — 'Arcade' an immersive gallery event that re-interpreted key works relevant to the history of fine art practice.
What Jaygo wanted to realise through these re-interpretatons was a synthesis of discipline, where the conceptual and material properties guided by the original works of art were subtracted from their primative contexts and synthesised into new forms of inquiry, including spatial dynamics, light, projection and interaction.
Inspiration for this show started with a backwards leap into the past and reached far into the future. When responding to an existing work of art and recreating it in physical space or incorporating it into a different medium we begin to project the future.
Art: Design: Identity
Film and sonic media elements created for the Salisbury Museum collection and exhibition "Ancient Landscapes".
A series of animated 3D photogrammetry models created with image data captured during field recordings in response to the ancient sites and megaliths of England.
This following identity included a multi-screen artwork installation titled "Heavy Weight Dub Plates”, presented in loop on eternal rotation.
Art: Design: Performance
A GABBA.TV residency for Pixelazo Electronic Arts festival in Bogota and Medellin. Colombia. Resulting in the creation and premiere of 'Marrakattak' a percussive, Latino, audio-visual instrument created out of a set of midi modified marracas. Marrakattak combines geometric Aztec, Zapotec and Mayan symobolism alongside 8bit sounds and video footage captured during our South American road trip.
Funded by the British Council and designed to create digital encounters and share skills and knowledge with the indigenous communities of Colombia. Marrakattak was a modified traditional instrument, providing a familiar activity but bringing about unfamiliar results, fused with a glitch based, 8bit, digital sensibility.
Workshops and performances were provided to the residents of 'Communa 13' alongside the Pixelazo Electonic Art Festival network and the award winnning VJ collective Pointless Creations, deep in the lush rain-forests of Colombia.
Art: Design: Interactive
‘Zapp You’re Pregnant’ is a sequence of video-mapped, interactive, short film narratives responding to the politics and practice of child birth. The installation is included in the permenant art collection 'Birthrites', Kings College. London.
For a period of six weeks alongside Senior Vice President of the Royal College of Gynecology, Dr Jim Dornan. Jaygo Bloom examined the role and reliance of technology within contemporary birthing procedures. The artwork demonstrates an alternative view to the birthing process; one which paradoxically is driven by technology, but at the same time exposes the lucid, often dream-state emotions of the expectant mothers resident in the ward.
Research for 'Zapp You're Pregnant' explored the entropic disorder associated with alchemical and scientific motif, drawing comparisons with ancient notions of rebirth and transformation.
Art: Performance
The idea of the mouth and the mantra. The Nothing, the Nothing that becomes and the Nothing that is.
In collaboration with The DanceHouse, Glasgow. O:.O:.O:. comprises of a series of choreographed scenes based on the composition of an Alexander Calder stabile, where the static body strikes poses and holds forms within the painting (improvising within an imposed modernist structure or grid).
The work re examines the theosophical beliefs behind early Modernist Art in relation to dance, film and sculpture, exploring how the body becomes a symbol for the illusory 'artistic' reality between geometric and organic planes within the art object.
Art: Design: Interactive
Commissioned by NEoN Digital Art festival in Scotland, and supported by Creative Scotland. the mobile game app "Bombaze" presented a playful way for an audience to interact with augmented works of art located around the city of Dundee. Real-time data captured by the app highlighted the relevance and virtues of locating augmented artworks in unsuspecting neighbourhoods, providing feedback that raised more questions than answers.
The challenge of finding the complete set of augmented works of art was supported by a printed campaign, clues were incorporated into a map and linked to the physical environment, creating a playful way for participants to discover the past and look into the future.
Our Urban spaces are permeated with visible and hidden technologies that collect and transmit data. How we connect, interpret and shape this data in our environment will become a significant challenge. This project explored where the online and offline world connects and disconnects, focusing on interactions with everyday communities and the "little ideas" that underpin the "big issues" that can often overwhelm researchers.
Creative work in production..
A new venture into viral visuals from GABBA.TV for the absurd 'Club Quarentena' collective, live on zoom every Sunday night throughout lockdown.
Twenty minutes of frenetic visual synthesis to accompany the Berghain Nightclub, Funfzehn mix. Tracks remixed and reassembled by Luke Slater for Berghain & Ost Gut Ton, video reanimated by GABBA.TV
Pra Mata Virgem! Is an online pavilion curated and designed by Jaygo Bloom and Cadu Riccioppo for the digital online biennale, The Wrong Biennale.
Finding its inspiration in the many moments in which Brazilian visual culture has dealt with its own marginality, both in terms of freeing itself from the cultural dependency that has marked the beginning of the 20th century from where we borrow the sentence ‘pra mata virgem!’ and in terms of defining a place of intervention in the cultural field which can deal freely with the aggressiveness of an always undefined culture.
Pra Mata Virgen! Acknowledges the experimental paths encompassing art practice that has led to fields of interest within both the 'veracity of speed' and 'the meditativeness of slowness' when attempting to comprehend and intervene the stream of contemporary society culture. The invitation to present work for inclusion within the pavillion, aside from its urge to reshuffle the terms with which it aims to produce new responses to the state of things, also recommends its counterpart - To not add anything to the noise, to stare, to stand, to wait in decisive non-action in the face of the present.
The Wrong
Pra Mata Virgem!
A towering pixel mapped pyramid, created for the Brazilian Dance Festival 'So Track Boa'. Setting the stage for two nights of tropical GABBA.TV live visuals, commissioned by the talented event and production agency 'Entourage', performed under the palms of Guarapari.
In the studio creating content for 0:.0:.0:. with director Jaygo Bloom, Members of the Dance House, Glasgow and choreographer Brian Hartley.
A presentation by Jaygo Bloom on creativity, collaboration and education, first presented at the University of Arts, London. Central Saint Martins for the BA Communication Design, Program Director Rebecca Wright.
Trust your instinct, never teach students not to trust, teach them to be brave enough to explore. Many students I come in contact with feel under pressure to prioritise skills and enhance employability above all else. However it is important that education helps to carve out a learning space protected from job prospects, where students can take chances, be encouraged to explore and experience what it is like to be a learner, to be a researcher, but also to have a duty not to neglect their career goals either.
Never stop looking, never stop sharing. As a teacher this means constantly looking at and coming up with alternative models for contributing to the development of design education. I look at the models coming out of Design departments such as ECAL, Basel School of Design, Eindhoven, Stuttgart. We are all working from the same blueprint and through our commitment to education we are all connected and all helping to build a better creative economy.
Make friends not contacts. Make true networks and meaningful relationships. Friendships always arise unhurriedly out of common interests and mutual approaches to practice. It was Bruce Mau who said 'Massive Change is not about the world of design; it’s about the design of the world.’ All the meaningful partnerships I have made believe in this potential for Design to bring about world change.
Listen. I believe the goal of good design is not to create good image but to communicate, and to communicate you need to connect, and to connect you need to listen. We have to remember who we are working for and people are at the centre of it all, As creatives we have the capability to weave our designs seamlessly into the fabric of contemporary life, learning to listen and learning how to share narratives that bridge social space can help transform any campaign or brand into a story, and the people listening into its storytellers.
Understand the other side. Understand what the other side wants. Support students to navigate education, the industry, an audience, a career. In education this means examining future forms of education and bringing design education and the creative industries into closer partnerships. Learning ‘with’ not ‘from’, not replicating industry but instead supporting a platform where new forms of design education partnerships can happen, preparing our students to benefit from the industry they will one day inhabit. I see this as ‘a multiple stakeholder situation’, in which our department and students become an intermediary between community and business enterprise.
Be interested rather than interesting. I work this way because I love what I do, it's much bigger than just getting the job done - it's my life. I share what I know and what I believe in. I embrace who I am and what I do best. Through embracing my passion within the studio it strengthens my practice and inspires in others. Teaching this way the world grows infinitely more enjoyable for myself and for students, and because of this my professional practice, my experience with teaching and my personal learning become all inclusive.
Embrace the next generation. Stay relevant and stay in touch. This means seek out the opinions of students to help shape and change design education. It also means learning from those that are ahead. Tony Brooks from Spin on a recent visit to our department, told our graduates keen to get a place in the industry, that they need to have great type, great layout, great ideas, but if they come with creative coding skills too then they are in. Approaches to design which include creative coding and realtime graphical processes are very seductive to employers right now and this is something which we need to support.
Do it with others. Share your knowledge between departments, across disciplines, learn from these experiences, collaboration can achieve great things. DIWO is a term that started in the hands of indie magazine makers. I use the term here to draw attention to the need for designers to contribute and collaborate with others. I agree with Paula Scher, whilst speaking at Londons AGI conference she said, 'Design is social. Art is personal.' This suggests that through involving others in the design process, our projects can become more informed and more relevant to those it wishes to address.
Make it simpler but not simple. Make sure people understand what it is you are saying. As a student, as much as it is for a designer it is important to work from inside a familiar territory. When presenting an edited narrative to a client or for student assessment this means learning what not to say as much as what to say. Look out for what makes that winning formula and tease it into new forms.
Get Connected, then get unconnected, then get connected again. Something radical has happened, a few years ago everything became connected and now everything in today’s world is about connectivity and it’s the incorporation of connectivity through design, through social media and social space, through participation and interaction that is fundamental to our ability to create, connect and deliver unforgettable experiences. And I would say it is not even necessarily working towards finished outcomes that is the answer, but it is the desire to connect through narrative, the joy of storytelling, the sharing of ideas and the process by which we arrive at our connections that is the most exciting to the world of Design right now.