Exploring Editing as Performance

While reading Barbara Londons Video/Art: The First Fifty Years, I came across her description of Laurie Anderson's approach to sound in her work: 

"She often became so absorbed in making her work that she was late to her performances. 'I'd barely finish editing the film, so I never got to the soundtrack. At the last minute, I'd grab my violin and run to the festival. I'd stand in front of the film, play the violin live and do the dialogue live'"

The idea of combining video art and live performance intrigued me, which led me to discussing the possibility of doing something similar with the musician that I'm working with for the soundtrack on this current assignment. She decided that doing this live would be quite difficult since she doesn't have a band and layers several elements together one by one, that she also records individually. However, the idea of a live performance of some sort still interests me. While I'm aware of VJs and their work with liquid light shows, reacting to the music and layering live and prerecorded elements together during live events, it got me wondering about how this may be applied to a film. Would it be possible to take a pre recorded song and a VJ setup, along with lots of prerecorded footage, and edit the film live? How would this affect the film overall? As I've en questioning the materiality of film as a whole, the nature of handmade cinema has been constantly on my mind, and while I've been approaching it through experiments such as Lounge test where I made the frames out of paper, the light shows, and animating by hand what could be done much faster digitally, this could be a way to bring the ephemerality of the handmade into the digital space. When talking with Joshua White about handmade cinema, he reminded me that while I am doing things digitally, I am still creating with my hands through the use of the trackpad, things are still tactile even though they are not being done on actual filmstrip. Perhaps editing like this could further exaggerate the point I am making about handmade cinema, with the film being different upon every performance. I will be doing some research into the history of this. I recall an artists doing this in real time in Zinman's book, but I wonder about the feasibility of doing this for a full 20 minute film. I also wonder if it would be better to present this after several experimentations, choosing the best one and keeping the best one as the final film, or if this would work better as an exhibition, with more of a performative element actually in real time. Coordinating even the prerecorded version would be very difficult logistically, but I will look into current VJ technology and what setup would work best. In an ideal world I would have one or two people working with me and doing the liquid light show elements like, coming in when they are ready, as was done in the Fillmore East by Joshua Light Show. 

Over the summer I will start experimenting with this and seeing how far I could feasibly take this concept, not only for the final film but future projects to come.