After loads of travels and events abroad, I had a chance to get some rest for a couple of weeks, and stay a bit around Bristol..  I also realized that I haven’t played ‘at home’ for a while, so I was really pleased when I’ve been asked to do some visuals for a Dubstep night at the Croft, which is the place where I did my very first VJ set when I moved to UK, back in 2004.

The organisers were more after a “stage design” rather than a simple screen setup, so it was the perfect occasion to get further in the “live painting” experiments that I did in June. 

If you know my work, you’ve probably noticed that I’m obsessed by minimalism, straight lines and geometry, but in the past few months I felt a bit stuck in cubes and grids, (especially after a big project in Shanghai last October, where I stayed in a room with 2500 cubes for 3 weeks) and I wanted to explore new patterns and shapes, so I started drawing more, and playing around with 3D softwares.

I’m fascinated by the work of Martin Böttger (tsaworks), and the way he deconstructs simple 3D objects into organic and very dynamic shapes, and he also works with different mediums (animation, but also paper cuts, sculptures and installations). I’m sure many of you already know his Tractor video (recently featured in the  onedotzero tours), but I also discovered recently his kluster_raum installation and his other works, and I just realized that I’ve been deeply influenced by him on this project.

Here’s a very short video of the preparations (I did many tests and sketches in order to find an interesting shape) and of the actual event: I painted during the afternoon and finished the painting during the night, and then I did an hour of live visuals during Shackleton set.

Thanks a lot to Shackleton, Nicolas Boritch for his help, and Woody for filming.

EXYZT CUBE INSTALLATION:
At the end of last year, I’ve been blown away when I discovered Etienne de Crecy live installation at Transmusicales festival (Rennes / France), not that I’m particularly a huge fan of de Crecy’s music, but I found the “stage design” very impressive and unique.
The show is an hour of visual mapping and projections on a big cube, while de Crecy is playing live electronic music, and triggering the lights and visual sequences, standing in the middle cube, inside the installation.

The setup is very effective, they used semi-transparent material to give more depth to the projections, and all the content is perfectly mapped to the structure, and produced with a very specific technique, to give the impression that the cubes are actually in 3D, and to create depth and volume.
In fact there is only one projector, and all the magic comes from the clever setup and the quality of production.

I found out a couple of weeks later that the brilliant Parisian crew Exyzt produced this installation (they are a team of architects, designers, geniuses technicians etc..) and after seeing their work a couple of times (at mapping festival), I wasn’t so surprised, and I couldn’t see anyone else doing such a great project.

THE KILLERS RIP OFF:
Waw, that was quite shocking !!!

A few days ago, I discovered a video of the american band “the killers” performing at the MTV EMA.

Same installation (with a few more cubes), same lighting effects, same content: rotating cubes mapped on the structure, with all the exyzt effects: same movements, rotations, even the same 4 colors have been copied from de Crecy’s set performance.
The only differences are the TERRIBLE mapping (not a single line is aligned properly), and hearts, equalizers, and other badly designed 2D visuals added to exyzt’s original content. Of course the result probably impressed most of MTV’s audience, but compared to the original piece, there was something fundamentally wrong in the Killers show, and it couldn’t be exyzt work.

LEFT: Original mapping by Exyzt - RIGHT: mapping failure by the Killers (click to zoom in)

This video might be offline soon, as Viacom (the owner of MTV) is trying to make this clip disappear from youtube (many copies have been removed already).

THE STORY:
It’s not that often when mapping installations are brought to mainstream audiences and TV shows, so I wanted to know more about this, so I contacted Franz from Exyzt, and Lauren (PR for the Killers) to get their inputs on this.
Franz confirmed that the MTV show wasn’t done by Exyzt, and in fact the MTV staff contacted them after seeing de Crecy’s installation to get a copy of it for “the killers” show. Of course this wasn’t possible, for obvious artistic and legal reasons, but the crew offered his services to create a new stage design for the American band.

MTV and the Killers probably didn’t want to be creative, and Exyzt never heard back from them, until they saw the Rip off of their work on TV.

Lauren never replied to my emails, so I don’t have the killers version of the story, but I guess they might be well ashamed now after doing such a bad thing.
We don’t know much yet about the company who accepted to reproduce the installation, but I doubt that this story will make them a good publicity either.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW ?
Lawyers are on the case to make the Killers pay for what they did, (remember kids, killers always get caught ). It’s a real shame to see great ideas stolen by big companies, and this might happen more and more, so it would be good to get this case known as much as possible, so maybe big bands will think twice before copying visual artists’ work next time.

Please forward this link to press, magazines, myspaces, blogs:
http://blog.antivj.com/2008/exyzt-installation-ripped-off-by-the-killers

Olivier Ratsi, who joined the label this year, has a long background in photography and graphic design, and his still creations have been featured in many french magazines and publications, such as Rexorama, Sonomag, and the covers of MCD guide or Etapes.

He just been commissioned by the New York Times to produce one creation for their “T” Logo series. The result is a full page in the paper version of the NYT style magazine, with 2 millions copies edited worldwide.

Here’s the copy we received this morning !

Crea composite and AntiVJ teamed up to produce a short ”son et lumière” show for Nuit Blanche Bruxelles on the 4th of October.

We’ve been commissioned by pixlmusic to create a 20 minutes piece to be performed twice during the evening. The content is a mix of 2D / 3D visuals, and also a part with mapping and architecture related projections.
This project was really interesting on the technical side, as the schedule wouldn’t allow us to produce everything on site as we normaly do, so we had to develop a new technique to do the mapping completely remotely, without calibrations or tests on the actual building before the production. 

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a Crea Composite / AntiVJ coproduction:

Visuals production:
- Yannick Jacquet (Legoman) 
- Jérémie Peeter (Shirü)
- Joanie Lemercier (crustea)

Sound: Thomas Vaquié
=============================
 

Here’s a short extract of the performance:

I meant to introduce you properly to Olivier for a while, but our busy planning has delayed my plans for far too long..

If you are interested in live visuals, you probably heard about Olivier’s work before, as the man is one of the most demanded VJs in Europe, and he performed in many festivals (Festival Optronica, Mapping, Nemo, Exit, Centre George Pompidou, etc) under his VJ name EMovie.  I presented his work a couple of times on this blog, in the Paysages electroniques 07 report, or after Nordik impact, at the time we were tracing the first lines of the Label project.

I discovered Olivier’s work a couple of years ago, and I’ve been instantly convinced by his visual style and his artistic statement. Unlike many VJs, all his content is created around a main theme, a research on the time and space dimensions, fragments and deconstruction, and you can find some very interesting meanings behind his pretty images.

Olivier applies his ‘time & space’ fragmentation technique on different subjects (simple shapes, urban and land scapes, and more abstract textures) and several mediums, such as photography (check his Anarchitecture series), graphic design (he worked with the cult Parisian ‘Rex club’ for many years), live visuals (multiprojection and unusual formats), and more recently he’s been exploring installation work..
 

ANARCHITECTURE

LIVE VISUALS - Demo 08

So we met several times with Olivier, and each time we realized that we were sharing the same interests and aim in our work (also with Yannick Jacquet and Romain Tardy): step away from the usual projections screens and formats, explore projections in 3D spaces and study visual perception, and the classical but fascinating ‘time/space’ subject.

This is what initiated the creation of AntiVJ as a label, which Olivier Ratsi is now part of.