Anna Helme

In late 1999 and 2000 I hung out with the PirateTV.net crew at the Ninjatune studios in South London, for weekly netcast live audiovisual jams. The PirateTV slogan was “DIY psychedelic political interactive streaming zentertainment with quality content from top selectors”. The lineup would change from week to week, the mainstayers being Mike (VJ Juxta), Bongo and Matt Black (Coldcut). Sometimes live musicians would come in, I’d often do live camera for those. We netcast from Matt’s studio “Spacelab” behind the record label offices, crammed with records, instruments, decks and audiovisual gear. There was even a couple of old early synthesizers that the Doctor Who theme song was played on, I’m not sure how often they got dusted off and plugged in. The Fairlight Computer Video Instrument got a fair bit of play, as did PCs running Vjamm (running early versions of Vjamm 2 at that stage) and the Panasonic MX50 video mixers. We used Real Producer to stream out to a varying audience, encouraging folks to hop into the IRC channel to chat while we jammed.
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Still from Mostar Trek

Mostar Trek (10mins, 2001) is an experimental/documentary of the PirateTV CAN-DU tour of the former Yugoslavia in 2001, produced for the Mixmasters series (Addictive TV) screened on ITV and internationally.

Mostar Trek features editing and footage from myself, Camilla Tornøe and Mark Scarratt from Headspace / Brighton ART. Music is by Matt Black of Coldcut. Perhaps because of this, or due to inheriting an editing style from freeform party vj-ing, it’s a bit of a mish-mash, but serves as documentation for our amazing 6-week trip.

We toured around with two trucks, a coach and an airstream caravan, bringing with us our own custom designed PA (check the space-age looking bass bins!), a big waterproof stage and 6 projection screens – along with the greatest number of video-mixers, laptops, cameras and other AV/VJ devices I have ever seen in one set-up.

During our tour we played at a basketball court in Lljubliana, a beach in Pula, a white marble palace in Dubrovnik, a cave in Mostar, a fortress in Belgrade, another basketball court in Banja Luca, a squat somewhere I have forgotten, and a university in Zagreb, and visited all kinds of amazing radio stations and art spaces. When I get a chance I’ll write more about our journey, as it really was an experience.

Glitch Western (2min 9 sec, 2003) is a snippet from a performance by Spoole (Anna Helme aka Spanna, Sean Healy aka Jean Poole, Andrew Sargent aka FutureEater) at Electrofringe 2003.

Spoole was an AV performance outfit performing between 2002 and 2004. We performed at various events from our first show at dLux’s Dataterra show to gigs at pubs, clubs, festivals and events like Electrofringe, Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Straight Out of Brisbane etc. At one point Spoole ended up on radio to advocate to the kids on JJJ that “VJing is fun!” (in chorus!) though as a matter of fact we weren’t VJs so much as AV performers working on an ever-evolving show around various themes (we narrowly avoided being turfed out of the ABC that day due to certain members of the band writing down their names at the security desk as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Johnny Cash… “you had Grandmaster Flash in here yesterday, do you think that’s his real name??”).

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