Richard Dent was intent on making his mark in the nocturnal world of clubbing when he first came across a clever bit of coding called VJAMM. Developed in the mid-90s, the software was an 'AV sample playback program', allowing video-jocks (VJs) to trigger any of 16 audiovisual clips instantaneously and play them out in a chosen sequence on big screens.

It proved a big hit in clubland, launching Matt Black and Jonathan More on a successful performance career as Coldcut, with a second outfit, Headspace, not far behind. Recently the two groups were acknowledged as fully-fledged artists when they were commissioned to create an installation at the Pompidou centre in Paris.

The result was 'Gridio', an interactive room where short clips of political figures intoning about 'terrorism' and 'evil', unrest on the streets and explosions are triggered in random bursts by pressure-pads scattered round the interior.

Dent himself was "blown away" by the program. By the time he caught up with it, it had already evolved from playing sequences into a test-version of a new polyphonic variant. But Dent, whose mother had long been involved in music therapy, began to see other possibilities in the software. He thought it could help disabled people.

The idea clicked into sharper focus when he attended a training workshop at Cross Border Arts, in Cambridge, on an older technology, Soundbeam. This works not unlike sonar, using clicks and echoes to locate movement, and has been in use for years by schools and centres offering help for disabilities and learning difficulties.

Dent put the idea of linking the Soundbeam to the VJAMM software to Cross Border's artistic director, Lorraine von Gehlen. She had been working to hook up professional artists with community groups, especially those dealing with disabled people, and readily agreed. The combined technology was christened 'Lightbeam'.

Through von Gehlen, Windmill School, in Fulbourn, Cambridge, agreed to host a session for kids with physical disabilities and severe learning difficulties. Dent's idea was to put visuals of the children's names on the screen in orange and green, linked to sound recordings of the names. When the children's movements were picked up, the colours on screen would suddenly reverse and the name sang out over the PA.

"When it worked, it was spectacular," Dent recalls. "We were there in a darkened room, then suddenly they started picking up on things. One of the young girls who was autistic seemed to be focusing and having fun with it. Her normal eye-rolling movement was interrupted."

During the day, Dent worked with several groups within the school. Windmill's headmistress, Kate Kemp, was also impressed: "The youngsters recognised that they could make things happen. The most able are very conversant with computers and the cause and effect. But this was very different. They enjoyed using the whole physical body to make things change, where normally they use touch screens."

Despite this promising debut, Dent became frustrated by lack of funding and left for Los Angeles. Von Gehlen wanted to carry on and turned first to CamART, the original group of enthusiasts, which had developed VJAMM - initially a pet project of chief programmer Russell Blakeborough.

By this time, CamART had spawned an offshoot, BrightonART, which was growing along similar lines. Both groups now do a mixture of straight commercial production, club music and arts projects. Mark Scarratt, of Headspace, had also begun to work on the south coast with able-bodied and disabled groups, including adults and children, often combining traditional percussion-based workshops with VJAMM.

Scarratt recalls a session for five or six children with disabilities ranging from middling to severe. He says: "There was a boy and a girl, both in wheelchairs. Both had very little control over their movements. The boy was deaf and the girl, blind. The deaf boy couldn't speak and the only movement was with his head.

"He had a switch he could move with his head and a little voice sampler to say a few words. So we recorded some bell and tambourine sounds into his sampler and we managed to get a rhythmic call-and-response by tapping out a rhythm on his knee.

"After about ten minutes he went completely inert. Usually he makes a sound maybe half a dozen time a day, but here he'd just done so about 40 times, so he was exhausted. But then he suddenly perked up again and started responding to one of the other kids, and then they swapped over in the call and response pattern."

Today, Dent concedes that his experience with disabled children is not conclusive proof of the benefits. But he adds: "In my opinion this is, at the very least, an important project. Kids who have restricted movement do at least have some fun."

And it is here that VJAMM loops back to its original purpose. Severely disabled people are never likely to enjoy the full sensory swirl of clubbing - yet the program enabled them to interact with the environment in a new and stimulating way. So in a sense, you could say it brought the club to them.

It was fun, certainly, and it also seemed to bring some of the more severely disabled participants out of their isolation, to enable group interaction for many of the less severely disabled, and a small but precious sense of control over their immediate environment for all. Potentially, it could bring them much more.


Links:

VJAMM - www.vjamm.com
Brighton ART - www.brightonart.org
Cross Border Arts - www.crossborderarts.org.uk

Lorraine von Gehlen can be contacted at lorraine.cba@breathe-mail.net

Hugo Davenport can be contacted at hugo1@btclick.com