Yesterday I had the honor to participate at the second edition of ‘Flimmerkiste’, the regional VJ gathering in Mannheim. The meeting place was the lounge area of Zeitraumexit close to the industrial harbor of Mannheim, the same location where last year’s B-Seite VJ festival took place. The round of attendees was small but select: Pixelschubser, VJ Tenner, TimVis and myself among a small group of curious young people from the national theater.
The formal part of the meeting was rather short – i felt a bit flattered, receiving a free beer to celebrate the ’5 years of flux’ anniversary – so I hoped we would quickly continue to the next point: AVIT Networking. We talked a bit about the planned issues and read through some text but eventually Pixelschubser decided to write down some info text about B-Seite at some point later.
Finally we proceeded to the most fun part of the evening: guerilla wildscreening in downtown Mannheim. Armed with a gasoline electricity generator, a nice 5000 ANSI projector, manfrotto tripod, V4 and laptops we walked through the Kreuzberg’ish ‘Jungbusch’ area towards the center marketplace where the huge city hall is located.
Equipment was set up quickly and we had a lot of fun, doing spontaneous mapping masks, jamming along, spreading Flimmerkiste flyers to curious bystanders. The cops came twice, but rather because of curiosity than maintenance of public order. Timing was perfect, because when the VJs really started to get groovy, the illumination of the city hall got switched off and we had the whole building just for ourselves.
go to http://vimeo.com/4898730 for Full HD
The evening in Mannheim was a lot of inspiration and fun and I was glad to be part of it. Frankly, the VJs around here seem a lot more spontaneous and kicking than most of us guys in Berlin – since we planned such a guerilla projection night forever without ever doing it. 
