Multimedia and performance artist Safy Etiel, aka VJ Sniper, first came to Wheel’s attention during his recent support slot for The Fall at London’s Hackney Empire in London. Mixing mesmeric visuals of celebrity pastiche with a wall of chanting, screeching and repetitious sound, the Berlin-based artist’s unique — sometimes alarming — approach to media critique has invoked a variety of reactions from Fall crowds and art galleries alike.
Interview by Victoria Ford
Describe what you do. My name is Safy and I'm known as VJ Sniper. I do audio-visual performances using found footage, altering it by scratching, skipping, jumping and manipulating it. It's media manipulation in its purest form. I mostly use the original sound of the video and at times add so-called related sounds on an extra audio channel which is made of fucked up CD sounds, fucked records and so on.
How did you get started with this? I started out by playing experimental music — industrial ambient stuff — and from there I moved into visuals because I found I had to add visuals to my musical projects just to have the audience concentrate on the music. From there I moved on to using video as a sampling source. I've found laser disc an interesting medium because you can just scratch back and forth and create new sounds with it.
Parallel to that I worked a lot with video loops. Together with a friend from Israel called Ron we had a show called The Wonderful World of Ron and Safy, which was basically a video concert where we used loops that we took from the media, documentary stuff, and extended them to long sequences to create a musical performance. So let's say you have rocket throwers by night as a sound and vision element, a rhythm box, then after that we would have an Aborigine with a didgeridoo or a bird singing. Those would be our basic elements to create music.
Then we [Safy and media artist Heinrich Dubel] started this project called Sniper in a studio in Berlin where everything was mixed with everything. It would be pop music, techno, newsreels, live news, electronic music, classical, whatever; it would all be put into the mix. I ran this space weekly and it was an exciting experience. Later on I called it Star Search And Destroy, taking famous rock artists or stars and scratching their video clips or live performances to create new music.
How did you start as the opening act for The Fall? I met up with Mark [E. Smith] and Elena [Poulou] in Liverpool Street Station, London. I was performing in London, they were performing in Oxford, and we met on the way as we usually did. We were just sitting in a cafe in the station like, "so what are you doing now?" And I took out my laptop and showed Mark the Elvis scratch. Two days later he asked me to join them for two concerts. This was about four years ago.
How do The Fall's fans react to your show? You could hear it at the Hackney Empire. The first night was more the typical rock audience so there were more boo-ings and the second night somehow it seemed a more arty audience, so there was less. Sometimes it's like these clowns in the bullfight arenas, I will be there to heat up the atmosphere. There is also a certain part of the crowd that likes to see these people get pissed, so you have different elements and it's funny.
One reporter said that when The Fall eventually came on it was like a pressure cooker exploding. At times, especially in the big cities, people are snobby and they can be really rude - we expect it from them. In smaller places mostly people appreciate that we are doing something they haven't seen before. After all, you know The Fall will come on when they are ready, it’s not me that's keeping them off the stage. People should realise that.
Left: a moment captured from the Elvis scratch; Right: installation piece My Little Pony
Why have you chosen to mash up aspects of pop culture? Working with pop culture is a part of viewing my environment in a critical way. My work recycles material. Doing that with a non-critical view would be wrong. You've used the word ‘mash’; and ‘mash-up’ is one of the sickest, cheapest things you can find, ‘mash-up culture’; taking a bad tune, adding another bad tune and creating a third bad tune, and I'm not doing that. I'm trying to take bad sounds and create something better with them, or at least create a critical view of them. If I use newsreels I will not just use all kinds of slaughtering scenes because it's fun to show blood. I try to be critical about what we see in the media and show it to the audience in order to raise questions, not to give answers.
If you are an artist and you're painting moustaches on faces of models in magazines, it has to be the right moustache and the right model in order to be powerful. So this is what I try to do, present the media as we know it from a different perspective.
I like to catch people from a bit of a different angle. There's a piece I did with John Travolta, which I called ‘Fever’. John Travolta is Tony Manero [in Saturday Night Fever] and he's waking up in the morning and he's fixing himself in his underwear, and when you play with it in the right way you just can't believe that this was put on screen. Extending a certain sequence can show you something totally different. Extending Elvis shouting — you know I use one of his last shouts in the piece? — extending this shout gives it a very interesting, touching element. On the other hand I'm trying to make people aware that these celebrities are just people and they became celebrities by this machinery that was put in place for them. I like to play with what people did to them, with the image of this person, not the actual person. Their agony.
Why did you call the project Sniper? When we opened our studio we opened the doors to the public. The idea was to create an atmosphere. People like to go to a place that's owned by an ex-wise guy, an ex-pimp, an ex-this, an ex-that. Why not have a place that's owned by an ex-killer, an authorised, government killer? One that’s retired and misses the 'good old days' when the colonies were still in existence and the borders were clear between good and bad; one who misses Southeast Asia and Chinese beer, Mekhong whiskey, chansons and ethnic music. That was the beginning of this place. It's a post-colonial, melancholic mood, that's what we call it.
Do you have a day job? I don't have a day job, I just have night jobs. I perform as a VJ accompanying DJs and for events. And I DJ almost weekly, an eclectic mix of music.
What do you have coming up? We're working on a big project in October. It's a theatre thing in a city in north Israel. You know I come from Israel? There's a theatre festival every October and we're trying to do a video performance together with an Arab classical performance.
If you want to see some of my political work, I once built three huge rocking horses [for a piece called My Little Pony] and you can sit on them and watch videos cut up at MTV-style speed, images of child abuse, not necessarily just sexual abuse, but more political abuse, social abuse of children. Art galleries are not interested in showing this work because it's just too political and not opposed to saying, “I'm political. 
More info on where you can see/hear Sniper
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