Waw, I haven’t posted anything here for ages !!
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).

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

We just changed our blog platform and moved to Wordpress, which is much more flexible and open.
So we’ll keep you updated here about our new projects and things that inspires us.

Here the new URL:
http://blog.antivj.com/

And the new RSS feed:
http://blog.antivj.com/feed

For the last week of the year, I’m having a well deserved few days of holidays, just between Switzerland and Austria, enjoying snowboard (the weather and snow is perfect this week).

The blog will be back in a couple of days with fresh new stuff:
- Lightup Bristol report: video of my set, a 1600 m2 mapping projection.
- Cuisine 12: report of our latest clubnight, with visuals from Digital slaves.
- Inode: a new A/V project, with origamis and a 3D projection in a 4 meters cube.
- AntiVJ: launch a our new visual label.
- An invisible touchscreen interface I’m working on, built with vvvv.

Thanks a lot for all your comments and emails, it’s nice to see that many people interested in live visuals.. The blog gets more and more visitors each month since I did the first post in 2006:

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160 000 hits
50 000 unique visitors
20 000 hits / month
videos: 100 000 views
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Here are a few other links if you are interested:
Flickr – Youtube – Myspace crustea – Myspace AntiVJ – AntiVJ website

I’m going away from the computer now, the snow looks amazing outside

Myspace a beau avoir en majorité des défauts (design exécrable, code préhistorique, gestion du CSS complètement dément, admin impossible à gérer..) c’est quand même un outil de networking très pratique.

Farouche anti-myspace au début, j’ai fini par essayer (attention, bugs sous firefox) pour voir, et à me prendre au jeu, l’interet premier étant de pouvoir joindre de nombreux artistes habituellement injoignables, et de se faire des contacts à l’étranger.. Malheureusement, l’interface de myspace étant un non-sens, impossible de rajouter des dates si le profil n’a pas été créé en “Band profile”, et trop tard pour revenir en arrière.

Je me suis donc créé un petit fichier flash pour afficher et raffraichir automatiquement les dates à venir, plus un petit formulaire de contact pour les bookings..

Faites moi signe si ca vous interesse d’installer un truc similaire, je peux adapter le code dynamiquement.
Première date à Berlin vendredi soir.. J’ai hâte !!

Hello.. Un tout premier Post timide, n’étant pas un grand fan de Blogs, je ne m’y étais jamais vraiment intéressé, et je passe déjà tellement de temps devant un écran que je voulais éviter de me prendre au jeu d’un nouveau truc à la mode. C’est en me balladant sur le blog du collagiste que j’ai vraiment compris l’intérêt de la chose.
Je suis installé à Bristol (UK) depuis un peu plus d’un an et demi, et il y a ici énormément de soirées et d’évênement (concerts, expos, installations, festivals..) et je vais essayer de vous donner un aperçu de tout ça, plus des expérimentations visuelles sonores..

Restez connectés…