The movement of Peter Rubin

It's Thursday, 2 May 1985. You're standing on the Rozengracht in a long queue of people who, just like you, want to get into club Mazzo. There's a buzz in the air. Inside awaits the expectation of new music, new wave, punk. Butterflies in your stomach, an elevated heartbeat. You don't know what to expect. Will you get in, or will you have to slink away with your tail between your legs and seek refuge at the ordinary Leidseplein? You know what to say at the door, but the possibility of being refused keeps haunting your mind.

Officially, Mazzo is a society for students doing something creative. Something audiovisual, journalism is also acceptable. You get closer to the door, people ahead of you are throwing towels into rings, like a mantra you repeat in your head that you're REALLY studying journalism, focusing on newspapers. And then, after saying it aloud once, you're admitted. You squeeze through the door, of which, oddly enough, the upper half is nailed shut, and suddenly you're inside, directly on the dance floor, which slopes significantly towards one side of the hall.

There's a salty smell, ice everywhere. You're overwhelmed by projections completely surrounding you that, together with the music, immediately bring you into ecstasy. People fall and slide on the melting ice covering the dance floor. You're inside Mazzo. The theme of the evening is Titanic, and exactly as the founders conceived it, the theme is carried through in EVERYTHING.

Co-founder Michiel van den Bergh: "The ice in the toilets came from the IJmuiden fish auction, the doors couldn't close anymore. People slid onto the dance floor with their legs wide apart! Everyone was immediately awake, pulled out of their comfort zone. People were more receptive to each other. When we worked with a theme, we didn't want a set. We wanted interaction with the audience. Nowadays you'd call it 'immersive', but we still called it a 'total experience'."

It was Peter Rubin who played a major role in creating that total experience. He was a VJ – Video Jockey, analogous to DJ – before the term VJ even existed.

We speak with Michiel van den Bergh, Hidde Kross of the VjAcademy and our own Simona Monizza – curator specialising in experimental and dance film – about the collection of visual material that Eye possesses from Rubin. That collection formed the basis for Return to Mazzo during Museumnacht 2024, where the door to Cinema 2 functioned as a hole in time behind which you found yourself in Mazzo.

"For me it was important that we would project everything analogically, as Peter would have done," Simona explains. "That meant we installed six slide projectors and three 16mm projectors, two with a continuous loop, and one with a loop that we cut into short pieces as Peter might have done. When you entered the room, you couldn't miss that row of projectors. They were operated by Onno Petersen, without whom this evening would not have been possible.""

That authenticity was also of great importance to Michiel. Since 2017, a year after Eye acquired the Rubin collection through a donation made possible by the VjAcademy (by securing the collection and connecting Eye with the heir), the former founder and the curator worked intensively together to make the reliving of Mazzo as intense and authentic as possible. For Michiel, this meant his kitchen table suddenly had a dual role as a projector workshop, where he personally serviced and synchronised the six Kodak Carousel slide projectors used during Return to Mazzo, making them change slides at exactly the same moment. "That's inherent to a museum, I think," he says. "If you want to represent a period, then you must use the machines that belong to it." That's why former Mazzo DJs Oscar Smit and Steve Green were also asked to play records. Everything to get as close as possible to the real Mazzo experience.

The work that Eye possesses from Rubin originally consisted of pallets of unfathomably organised VHS tapes with cryptic descriptions on the labels, 16mm film, slides, posters and magazines. Together with interns and Michiel, Simona tried to bring structure to the material. Besides Rubin's own work, the collection also included source material such as TV recordings, pornography, and slides from other films that Rubin used for his 360-degree projections.

"There are also unwashed t-shirts from raves where he performed in the nineties," Simona adds. "He always cut off his sleeves," says Michiel. "Also on these?" Simona laughs and confirms. "Maybe we should wash them after all."

Eventually, Simona and Michiel managed to select visual material from the enormous collection for Return to Mazzo, which could be used to create slide projections that remained faithful to the original. "We had three 16mm loops copied onto new 16mm film," she nuances that originality. "The original material has become too fragile to safely play on a projector, so we had to work with copies."

In the eighties, when Rubin was busy making visuals, VJing or developing concepts in Mazzo almost daily, his VJ booth consisted of a tangle of cables, film reels, film, slides and projectors. The loops were created by him live, the images selected on the spot. Sometimes even supplemented with live images from the hall. "It was about being able to feel the room," says Michiel. "He worked together with the bands and artists to get the audience involved, to stir them up, to react to their energy."

Simona: "He really had an idea about that, an evening had to start quietly, then the energy had to go up, and then end quietly again." In the earliest beginning, Rubin could react to the energy in the hall, but not directly to the music. It wasn't until 1981 that Jos Heijnen – who also made computer generated images (CGI) for Rubin on an Amiga – designed a 'switcher' for Rubin, with which he could actually mix between the signal from different image sources on the beat. This made it a precursor to the later video mixer.

It's 30 April 1993. While in the Netherlands Queen's Day is being celebrated, you're standing in Dortmund. You're in the Westfalenhalle where your eardrums find no rest anywhere. At every spot in the hall complex, the bass massages your eardrums. Doors vibrate in their frames, people move from hall to hall to be on time for their favourite act. On the line-up you read that Jeff Mills is spinning and Moby will play a live set. From Amsterdam, Flamman and Abraxas are present, who will perform as Fierce Ruling Diva.

You can't walk into the hall, you're sucked in. The abstract and psychedelic visuals change on the beat. You're tripping even before you've dipped into the bag of mind-altering substances in your sock. This night will feel both short and long. You're at Mayday, the techno festival to which American-born filmmaker Rubin had attached himself at that time. He was also one of the driving forces behind the Berlin Love Parade, where his visuals reached millions of people.

"That's exactly why a club has a right to exist," explains Hidde Kross – who, despite not being a VJ himself, sees Rubin as a mentor, and co-founded the VjAcademy where Rubin was a guest lecturer. "Clubbing was then even more than now about celebrating being together. We sometimes forget how idealistic house used to be, it was a kind of new flower power. Rubin felt that, and really built a community. That was his philosophy. He sought collaborations, and did everything he did with a lot of emotion and feeling."

Hidde speaks with love about Rubin, whom he saw not only as a mentor but also as a friend. "It feels very special to have known him. How often can you talk with one of the founders of your profession? What he conceived, you still see in contemporary music videos. He would probably have found it too commercial, but if you look at a clip from Dua Lipa, you can trace that directly back to Rubin's work."

Work that is easily recognisable, according to Hidde. "During his lessons, he taught that the eye wants variation, so you need to alternate abstract patterns with images from the real world. And those abstract patterns weren't common in film at all when he started. In painting they were, think of Mondrian. He also liked to use images from nature, that was his way of fighting for the climate. That wasn't common practice at all back then."

For Simona too, his style is clearly identifiable. "He came from experimental film, which he shot in the seventies and eighties. He had an enormous network of creators around him, also from America and Eastern Europe, and used much of their work. That made him essentially a found footage maker, with a preference for abstraction. What I understand from the collection we have of him is that he sometimes cut things up and shortened them to make loops that ran continuously in his work throughout the evening. He also liked a specific structure, with a screen within a screen, he manipulated lenses, scratched film, coloured it in. The animations that Jos Heijne made on his Amiga, he filmed with a 16mm camera, and then used that in his projections."

Michiel confirms that Rubin was a found footage maker. "I once went with him to a filmmaker somewhere on the third floor. There he picked up all sorts of used film reels that he then used the material from."

"A real hell for an archivist," Simona adds with a laugh.

One might wonder whether the original material and the manipulated or unmanipulated source material are equally interesting. "For me they are," says Simona. "When you make a film, you make a product with a beginning and an end, which can be shown in a cinema, and is experienced in that form. He himself said that he missed the live element of VJing so much with his films that before a film was shown, he was already busy with other projects and no longer felt like talking about the previous film. VJing really gave him the opportunity to react to the audience, that was his drive. He wasn't so much a maker, but more a creator, part of a large creation. Later in his life, he wanted to really send positive energy to people with his work, as a pure leftist. Connecting was a political message for him. I heard from someone with whom Rubin worked intensively in Germany that he drove neo-Nazis out of the club with his hippie-like images."

According to Hidde, Rubin's activist streak stems from his humble origins. "He grew up in Brooklyn, which was really a poor neighbourhood then. At eighteen, he wanted to become a journalist, which meant he would already be addressing social issues. He wanted to teach people what was happening in the world, but he wasn't the only one doing that back then. He even spent time in Portugal fighting against the dictatorship there. That drive never left him."

Apparently, that drive was contagious to his former students, which is why it isn't foreign to Hidde either. "Following in Rubin's footsteps, some of the current generation of VJs also use their medium for a live audience to convey a social message. Preferably together with the musicians, of course. Like with Frenna, across the entire width of the Ziggo Dome in enormous letters 'Black Lives Matter'. That made an impression."

In the 2010s, Hidde and his VjAcademy and Veejays.com colleague Daan Nolen helped Rubin move to Berlin. "We handled all the boxes with his material and transported them with a van. That's how we knew exactly what was in his collection. When I heard of his death, I immediately asked his landlord, whom we knew well, not to touch anything and looked for a good home for the collection. That turned out to be Eye."

Rubin's material was made to connect, to stir up and to dance to. A place in the depot therefore doesn't seem to do justice to the work. Simona agrees but doesn't have an immediate solution. "The depot is just the beginning of a long-term process where the contents of the boxes wait for inventory, registration and then curatorial decisions. This process can take years without the help of interns. Of course, it would be nice to have extra budget for digitisation, but that can best be done when there are exhibition possibilities. A partnership with Germany seems an interesting possibility to explore. Ninety hours have now been digitised, but that's still only a small part. There's also a box with tapes from when he worked at club Panama. That shows a later period of his work, and is therefore also interesting to digitise. We also have many tapes of raves with the final result, the output of what he mixed. Sometimes with music too, those are the best. Return to Mazzo was really a dream we had for a long time, and has also shown the potential of such an event."

Curator Simona Monizza previously made a video essay about Peter Rubin: