The 3Destruct project started in 2007, inspired in part by the wide-open yet claustrophobic space of an underground car park that the Biennale of Contemporary Art of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium had offered. Since then, the project has been presented in other festivals: Mapping Festival in Geneva (2007); Image Radio, Eindhoven (2007), 100% Montpellier (2008); most recently Yota Space in Saint Petersburg (2010).

An installation that occupies its host space in a particular and demanding manner, staging it requires finding the right venue. Since seeing the original Biennale presentation, the curator of the French festival Scopitone, Cedric Huchet, has been looking for that venue. 2011 saw the festival partner with the large former biscuit factory Le Lieu Unique, and in that space Cedric finally knew he had the perfect opportunity to host 3Destruct.

Allocated in an old workshop with industrial architecture typical of the late 19th century, we worked over a week to adapt the installation to this new space. As well as the expected issues of scale and placement, we had to update the whole projected sequence to eliminate all horizontal lines which we found just weren’t looking right especially in the more minimal sequences with the particular material used for this staging. Its a piece with real dynamic range and we had to keep that, and then we found the new constraint turned from challenging to a liberating new visual direction.

For those who might be interested by the technical aspect of the project, here are some schematics of the setup.

3Desctruct / Le Lieu Unique
4 volumes laid with mesh; 4x 1024 30fps Video streams;
6.1 surround sound.
Visuals: YANNICK JACQUET, JEREMIE PEETERS
Music: THOMAS VAQUIE

Many thanks to Cedric Huchet for inviting us, the Lieu Unique team for helping with the construction, and everyone involved in the project.

/Yannick


Official page: http://antivj.com/3Destruct_v2/

Related posts:
- 3DESTRUCT
- 3DESTRUCT IN RUSSIA WITH ONEDOTZERO

They contacted us recently to be part of   “Yota space”, a massive exhibition in the center of St Petersburg – Russia, combining interactive art and installations and talks. AntiVJ was then invited to present 3Destruct, one of the first installation that initiated the label, in a new version, from the 6th to the 19th of December 2010.

3Destruct,

by Yannick Jacquet, Jérémie Peeters (Visuals)
Thomas Vaquié (music)
Nicolas Boritch (production)

Part of the event were also Quayola, Max Hattler, Field, Memo Atken, UVA, Brian Eno and many others. Here’s a video report of the festival, by onedotzero.

We were also part of onedotzero_adventures in motion in London, with a new installation: Eyjafjallajökull, about the islandic volcano that erupted in May 2010, a very long story (I post something about it soon), also commissioned by onedotzero Director Shane Walter and presented in New York last year.

It’s a great place to discover new artists, installations, vj sets, talks and workshops, meet visual artists from all around the world, and start collaborations, and also a good occasion to party hard !

The festival takes place in Geneva, Switzerland, and is spreaded over many locations across the city: the contemporary Art Gallery (first time I ever saw contemporary VJ installations mixed with interactive pieces and workshops, in a gallery space), l’usine club (where most of the good European VJ have played at least once), Artamis: an artists squat, and many other venues all around Geneva, with also outdoor projects and happenings.

The name of the festival has actually nothing to do with video mapping, and the first edition was in 2005, way before architectural projections started being trendy in the VJ community, and the use of the word mapping is more about connecting elements: art, people, technology, clubs, gallery spaces..

A long history with the mapping festival.
Yannick Jacquet (legoman) being originnaly from Geneva, he has his very first VJ residency at le Zoo / L’usine, and also designed their flyers for years. Being at the time a user of the great Mac VJ software: Modul8, he quickly met Boris Edelstein, the main guy between M8 and also curator / director of the festival. Legoman then played at the very first edition of the mapping festival, in 2005, alongside other visual artists, such as D-Fuse, Exyzt, Lab-au, Olivier Ratsi …

I went there for the first time in 2007, to present a mapping installation (an early version of the light sculptures), and this is where I met 1024, and the infamous Sigma6 for the first time.
The label did not exist at the time, and seeing 3Destruct live for the first time was like a blast for me, and it is the first trigger that gave me the idea of working with Yannick and start a visual label: AntiVJ.
A year later, for the 2008 edition, we were back as a team: Romain Tardy, Olivier Ratsi, Yannick Jacquet and myself, to present our first collaborative project together: Light sculpture v2, and the very first project under the label AntiVJ (a structure to develop and promote our work), thanks to Boris and the mapping team.

St Gervais
For 2010, the focus of the festival was architectural projections, and the idea of using existing buildings and structures as a canvas. Since the Audiovisual performance we did in Breda: Grote Kerk, and another project he did: Gesu Church, Yannick Jacquet wanted to do a project combining religious architecture, and rather minimal visuals. Doing something in the St Gervais church for the mapping festival was then a perfect opportunity.
Yannick went on site to prepare the project, calibrate the projections and get some inspiration from the actual space. Here’s the video teaser he made, a couple of months before the festival:

The piece was then produced in Brussels, in collaboration with Thomas Vaquié who composed the music, and Diego Innocenzi who played the organ live (“Annum per annum” by Arvo Part), as part of the performance. Here’s a short extract of the piece, with an interview of Yannick and Thomas.

The interview was captured by Jerome Monnot and Ilan Katin, on the 8th of May 2010.

Here’s the first video report, and there are many more to come !

So last May, we’ve been commissioned by Montreal based Mutek festival to produce an Audiovisual piece in the Old port. The canvas was an old scaffolding tower built in 1957, and used to load grain into massive ships, to export Canadian cereals all around the world.
In 1983 the 2 twin towers are abandoned, one is completely dismantled and the other is still standing there, as part of Montreal industrial heritage.

We came on site a few weeks before the event to check all technical options, and realized that we couldn’t really project on the rusted structure, as the projections wouldn’t be bright enough, and it would look a bit too chaotic. So we decided to put up a large white “screen”, and used an optical illusion effect to re-project what was hidden behind this screen.  It was an challenging approach, as we try to avoid screen formats as much as possible (this is why we project onto architecture and 3D objects) but it gave us much more freedom for the content production.

Here’s the video report of the piece we presented, which is about this ghost industrial tower and it’s yet disappeared twin.

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VISUALS: Olivier Ratsi, Joanie Lemercier
MUSIC: Thomas Vaquié
Webpage: http://www.antivj.com/mutek_09/
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We have been well busy with the label since January, and haven’t had a chance to post reports of any of our recent performances, but I think September is a good time to refresh the blog and keep you up to date !
We’re still in the process of editing footage and putting together the pictures and videos, but here are the few projects that I want to introduce here:

Performances and installations
- Grote kerk: a light and sound performance in Breda cathedral (NL), january 09.
- Tour des Convoyeurs: outdoor installation in Montreal (CA) old port, for Mutek in May 09.
- Nuits Sonores: Stage design and live visuals in Lyon (FR), May 09.
- Enghien: a mapping performance for Bains numériques festival near Paris,  in June 09.
- Sondgo: a mapping performance for the opening of a futuristic building, near Seoul (Korea) in August 09.

Projects on Tour
- Principles of geometry + AntiVJ, a stereoscopic show (3D projections, visuals by Joanie Lemercier,  Simon Geilfus and Desaxismundi).
- Murcof + AntiVJ. Visuals by Simon Geilfus

AntiVJ labs: Research and Development
- AntiVJ Mapping Toolkit !
- Stereoscopy + tracking prototype*.
*we will showcase the prototype at the Watershed event on Thursday, check video below.

So we keep ourselves quite busy, and we are really excited about the next upcoming events, as we will present some of the label’s projects in Bruxelles, Paris, Rennes, Talliin (Estonia), Brazil (3 gigs tour), and Sonderborg, (Denmark).
We will soon announce more about all these projects, and details about future events will be available on the website.

AntiVJ showcase at Watershed
By the way, we are doing a showcase in Bristol this week, to present these recent projects and the different things happening on the label, so if you’re around South West UK on Thursday, please come and meet us at the Watershed: http://www.watershed.co.uk/exhibits/2028/

This event will take place at 1800hrs (not 1700hrs as advertised) in Cinema Three.

We are doing a talk, in an informal way, so feel free to ask questions, and also a presentation of our new stereo + tracking prototype, (tickets are limited, so hurry up).

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.

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.

=============================
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:

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.

Legoman (Yannick Jacquet)
Graphic designer, VJ, motion designer
Also, Legoman just joined the Core of AntiVJ.

Shirü (Jérémie Peeters)
Graphic designer, print silkscreener, VJ

Thomas Vaquié
Musician, sound designer, sound engineer

3Destruct is an immersive installation, a large semi transparent cube that generates light an sound, and as the visitor walks through, he loses his landmarks in this non-linear universe that destroys any spacial coherence.

This project has been presented in Belgium (Louvain), Switzerland (Geneva) and Netherlands (Eindhoven) as an installation, and will be presented soon with a live performance.

AntiVJ – 3Destruct from antivj

Since the launch of the label, everything is going even faster than before, and we have loads of new projects, ideas and bookings coming up..

I’ve been exploring new fields recently:

- Dome projection, in Bristol planetarium, with the mexican producer Murcof, and the 360° projection format is very immersive, even more than I expected, so I think I’ll carry on with this technique.

- Stereoscopic projection, with polarised filters and silverscreen (same technology as Imax3D), to make visuals appears in 3 Dimensions to the audience. This is also a fascinating technique, and we are investing a lot in this way, and we’ll do more dates soon for the stereoscopic tour, with french band “Principles of Geometry“.
- More experiments, with lights, DMX and perception.

I also did an interesting experiment the other day, I miss a lot painting, as I used to do draw a lot and do graffiti / stencils before, but I’ve been too busy with projectors recently, and a commission for an exhibition in Bristol brought me back into acrylic paint..
I’ve been asked to do a short live performance for the closing of an Art exhibition, and I wanted to use the mapping technique live painting and perspective, so I quickly put together some visuals inspired by a sketch from the light Artist James Turrell.

AntiVJ Lab – Live painting & mapping from antivj.

Thanks to Cristina for filming the performance.