Gift of sound and vision

Artists like Keith Piper are going where Chagall and Warhol have gone before - but this time on the club scene.

Speeded-up images flash on to a screen: Chairman Mao, skyscrapers, commuters swarming like ants through cityscapes, lurid sunsets, pyramids and chains of DNA. Colours and icons flicker and intercut, synchronising with the music: big beat, techno, drum and bass. Meanwhile, two DJs hunch over a keyboard and a laptop, mixing sound and images at the touch of a button.

This is a nightclub in Nottingham, and the effects are being produced by something called Club Mix - a collaboration by which DJs, producers and, for the first time, fine artists are combining to create an entirely new genre of sound and images.

In recent years, the advance of technology has relegated traditional nightclub visuals to dinosaur status. Remember those disco lights and groovy day-glo slide projections? Well, probably not. These days, images that aren't cut and mixed live on the spot seem about as naff a prospect as a DJ turning up with a pre-mixed party tape. Images and music have to intertwine; one must affect the mood of the other.

Of course, this is nothing new. The real precedent was Andy Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable", the psychedelic light show that accompanied the Velvet Underground's few live shows. In spirit, at least, the aesthetic has changed very little. Warhol's shows would include a display of cut- up images that synchronised with the music's rhythm - the lights, colours and shapes would enhance, and articulate, the chemical state of the audience - and the band, of course. Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead relied on similar psychedelic imagery.

What is new is that pretty much anyone these days - thanks to computers - can create and sample their own images, then synchronise them with music. The celebrated London DJ duo Coldcut have to take a lot of credit for this recent accessibility. Matt Black and Jonathan More, among the first generation of British DJs to emulate new York hip-hop, operate from Ninja Tune, their record label and multi-media house near London Bridge. Two months ago, they released a video-sequencing computer software program called VJamm - available in the High Street - that allows users to download video images, then cut and mix them by pressing buttons on the key pad. Each key stroke can produce a different image rather than a sound.

Yet just as Coldcut are demystifying their art for a much wider audience, established artists like Keith Piper and his Club Mix colleague Pervaiz Khan have begun to take a professional interest. Funded by the Institute of International Visual Arts, Club Mix, they are following their Nottingham preview by playing in Birmingham and London where they'll be joined by polemical dance collective Asian Dub Foundation.

Piper, who is 38 and from Birmingham, was involved in black politics before branching out into digitial multi-media. He has a strong interest in collage, dadaism, and more recently, three-dimensional installations. Images of street culture, surveillance, black masculinity and urban decay are recurrent themes in his work; club visuals seem like a natural progression. He feels his latest work follows on from a hip-hop sensibility where a similar cut-and-mix collage aesthetic applies. "It is parallel to the tradition of the scratch DJs who created a collage sound. I'm doing the same thing with visuals; responding to a live event - acting as a human machine interpretation," he says.

In a career retrospective, Relocating the Remains, which shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York this summer, Piper creates video collages and CD-Rom video works, including one confrontational interactive game entitled Caught Like A Nigger in Cyberspace. His digital effects are impressive even though they are created from a humble Apple Mac with a basic software package - he's using a similar program for Club Mix.

When Coldcut were first cutting up images live, nobody would have dreamt of defining their work as `art'. With the emergence of a project like Club Mix, though, issues of art, audience and authorship have become significant.

Piper is keen to play down his role as an artist, preferring to blend in as an anonymous player in the group process. "I'm interested in creative collaboration and appealing to a range of different audiences. It's the accessibility of the technology to artists like me that has been so key."

Khan, a digital artist working with Piper, agrees. "Four or five years ago, this wouldn't have been possible. The costs would have been prohibitive and it could never have been as spontaneous and improvised. For me, I wanted to work alongside other visual artists, musicians, producers and DJs. We call it digitally assisted hedonism." Khan has created a series of images for Club Mix: urban, archaeological and religious.

As Khan points out, artistic involvement in popular entertainment is nothing new. Hockney created opera sets while Chagall and Dali lent their creative talents to cinema. When Khan enthuses about his interest in images of mother goddesses across different cultures and time-lapse imagery ("We're all fascinated at how digital and video technology can play with time: slowing down and speeding up") you feel it's a million miles away from the world of Coldcut, where notions of art, semiology and deconstruction have never been a focus for discussion - not that seriously anyway. The music always comes first.

And looking at the visuals flashing up in Nottingham, it's hard to discern any significant artistic output, or anything that comes close in terms of innovation to, say, Orbital's visual mastery or any Orb show six years ago. The Club Mix PR anxiously reassures me that this is only a preview and the next show at Birmingham will be much more sophisticated. Undoubtedly this will be the case. Still, you can't help thinking that in contrast to any club in London on a Wednesday night, this generation of "artistic" newcomers have quite a lot of catching up to do.

Yet Club Mix, like Coldcut, do share a desire rarely expressed in other popular mediums; to demystify the process of creating and sampling music and imagery. Coldcut achieved this most successfully with their software program but Club Mix are following in a fashion with a series of workshops which will accompany their live dates.

Gary Stewart, head of multi-media projects for the Institute of International Visual Arts, who commissioned the project, explains: "People who aren't that specialist can try it out. The idea is to show everyone how it really works. Keith has created 50 10-second loops [of images] that can then be played around, sampled and mixed on computer." Stewart believes that audiences are certainly sophisticated enough to create their own audio- visual material. "This project is very much about how people have such a good literacy and understanding of audio sampling; they feel comfortable with sound being mixed and the origins being distorted."

Just as the humble techno-boffin started out on a four- track sampler, a new generation of audio-visual experimenters may well be sitting in bedrooms, quietly shaping the future of club scene culture. And whether what they produce is deemed "art" or not hopefully won't be an issue.

The Drum, Birmingham (0121 333 2444), 24 April; Happiness Stan's, Smithfield, EC1 (0171-236 4266), 1 May. For details of IIVA workshops call 0171 636 1930.