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

The surgeon: Nicolas Boritch, now producer at AntiVJ, the bathrobe guy: Jérome Monnot, made many of our video reports, Lady pouring milk: Yolanda, singer for Massive attack, and myself as a red faced Santa.

At that time I was experimenting with wiimote hacking, projection mapping (my first tests were on the neighbour’s house), I was also travelling a lot to VJing events around Europe such as the mapping festival (Geneva), and discovered inspiring art installations. I remember being blown away after seeing 3Destruct for the first time in 2007, and the discovery of this project triggered the idea of starting a label, dedicated to visual art.

2008 AntiVJ
In early 2008, with Yannick Jacquet, Olivier Ratsi and Romain Tardy, we decided to work more together, and then officially started AntiVJ, a structure to develop, produce and promote visual arts, and a focus on the use of light in 3D space (as opposed to a projection on a flat screen).

Then Nicolas Boritch joined us as a producer, to “try and make things happen”, Thomas Vaquié started composing music more regularly for architectural mapping pieces and became a key artist for these projects, and others. Creative coder Simon Geilfus is the latest visual artist to join the label (Murcof project). His work on realtime tools is also changing the way we approach new pieces.

NEW BLOG
So long story short, this blog, which started as a personal diary about VJing projects, doesn’t really make sense in its current format anymore, and this is now the time to open it up to the other members of the label, and to turn it into a shared space.

So from now on, the articles will be signed by their author, and we’re all looking forward to use this space to share ideas, event reports, upcoming projects, and generally to reflect a bit more the activity of the artists on the label.

You can expect posts from AntiVJ members:
- Simon Geilfus
- Yannick Jacquet
- Joanie Lemercier (myself)
- Olivier Ratsi
- Romain Tardy
- Nicolas Boritch (producer)
- Thomas Vaquié (music producer)

We’re also hoping to freshen things up in the new year (communication, website, reports) so watch this space.

Joanie.

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

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

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

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

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 !!

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…