Motherboard

The annual three-day Blip Festival is the mecca for all things chiptune, the throwback musical legacy of the Commodore 64, the Game Boy and all the other beeping video game systems of yore. The 2009 festival, held at the Bell House in Brooklyn in the frigid depths of December, was packed with chiptune artists and enthusiasts from across the globe—many underage, mostly boys, and all participating in giddy, geeky, outdated-videogame-console-generated audiovisual bliss. It wasn’t all button-pushing: there was plenty of dancing (a sort of happy, frenetic, two-armed first-pumping melee that somehow combined moshing, raving, and vogue-ing), to match the electro-beats, colorful, chaotic visuals, and scrawny, spasming performers. There was however little sign of the illegal substances that one might think accompanied the scene. Highs here come straight from computer chips.

In between the beeps and bloops, we caught up with Jean Y. Kim, an adorable 21-year-old studio art student at NYU who came to see some friends play at the Blip Festival in 2007, took some programming classes, got herself a Game Boy and an internship with 8bitpeoples, and just two years later was performing as one of only eight visualists at the 2009 festival. To her chipmusic peers, Kim is the whimsical fine-arts kid, and to her art friends, she’s the computer geek—but to us, she’s just kind of rad.

See our other Blip Festival coverage by chiptune artist and blogger Zen Albatross, and our interview with chiptuner Little-Scale

Motherboard: So how did you get into doing this sort of thing?
Jean Kim: I took a digital art class, and I was learning how you can use programming to make visual graphics and things like that. And then my friends were in this band—"Anamanaguchi":http://www.anamanaguchi.com and I went to see them play at Blip Festival in 2007. Because I had just found out about the technology, and then I saw the applied form right away, it was really amazing. I was like oh, I really want to do this.

What did you do once you realized you wanted to do visuals?
I took more programming classes so I became more comfortable with straight-up coding. I also started going to a lot more shows and meeting more people. Then I interned with one of the organizing groups, 8bitpeoples, for about a year, and so I met basically everyone. I was talking to this one VJ, Paris, last December, and I mentioned that I was thinking about VJing. He got really excited and gave me all the gear and everything I needed to know.

What equipment do you use?
I use one Game Boy Advance that runs an application that Paris developed. How that works is that you draw out tiles, which are 8×8 pixels, and then you move it. If you were to use that same coding language for game development it would be like mapping out backgrounds and then moving the backgrounds around, but because this is more abstract, it changes more as it’s moving. I’m also using two GP2Xs, which are both running a software called Pikix, which is image software where you load in clips and convert them so you can manipulate them.

Is it exciting?
It’s really exciting. Two years ago, I didn’t know anything about this except that it was really awesome, and now I’m playing. It’s weird for me because I’ve been in it for awhile now and I know quite few people, but I feel in some ways kind of isolated or like I’m the black sheep because I have a background in fine arts—photography and drawing and stuff like that. And then when I’m with my friends who are art kids, I’m the computer nerd. So I’m kind of this weird in-between.

Are there a lot of other girls doing what you’re doing?
No, not at all. If you took a random sample of a hundred people here, there’d probably be four girls. This year has quite a few more women performing in comparison with before. There are three female VJs—myself, Rosa Menkman, and Output.

What’s the scene like?
It’s really straight edge. It’s totally nerdy, the nicest nerds you know.

Does everyone have their own style? What’s yours?
Totally. Some people come from straight up coding backgrounds, so for them a really large part of their style is taking hardware and coding programs for them. For me, and another VJ, Alex Bond, who goes by Enso, we go for a more illustrative approach. He has a lot more talent in drawing pixel art than I do, but for us it ends up being more about the image. I would say for most VJs, it’s a mix between what graphics we do and then how we make them.

Did you discuss the performances with the musicians you were paired with beforehand?
I try to do as much as I can. For this festival, I was paired with Silent Requiem, Trash Can Man, and Starscream. I’m good friends with those boys [from Starscream], so it became really collaborative. They gave me a really good sense of what they wanted. Trash Can Man and Silent Requiem don’t live here, so when I found out that I was paired up with them, I sent them an email asking them if they had anything in mind and they were both really awesome about it. They had some small requests that I tried to incorporate, but they told me to do whatever I wanted. Generally musicians don’t really care because they have a lot of trust in the visualsts that it’s going to look appropriate.

Do you only VJ in the chiptune world, or have you branched out?
Most of the time it is with chip music, because that’s how I got started and I really don’t know how to use real DJ programs. But I have done a few shows for other people. I’m not exclusive about it , but this is what I’m more comfortable with.

What are your goals for the future?
I’d like to keep going. It would be cool to play again next year. There are a lot of things I’ve learned from this experience, and I can see myself improving. I’ve only been doing this for a few months. I’ll do a good set and think I’m getting the hang of it, and then there are people here that have been doing this for ten years, and I’ll see a few minutes or even a few frames and I’ll be like oh, never mind, I don’t know anything—time to go back to the drawing board. I feel like I have so much more to figure out, so hopefully I’ll keep doing this and learning.

Images: Flickr/m_becker, Robert Pappagallo, flameboymusic, NYU Art Dept