Since then, 3Destruct has been exhibited in Mexico, Russia, Switzerland and France.

In the summer of 2013 we were invited by the Berlin Atonal festival to present the piece at the Kraftwerk berlin, a former power station in Berlin’s Mitte. Disused in 1997, this piece of Berlin’s industrial history which used to power the former East regions of the city, is now converted in an exhibition and event space. During our scouting visit we were immediately seduced by this cathedral of concrete where giant pilasters and steel girders create a scenery of post industrial uchronia. The ideal set for a piece such as 3Destruct.

Thanks to a high standard an uncompromising music programming the event was a real success.
Murcof + Simon Geilfus’s live performance, another project of the Antivj label, was also presented during the festival.
We are taking this opportunity to present you this new take on the installation, and to announce that 3Destruct will be back in Berlin, this time at the Opernwerkstaetten, from April 10th to May 25th 2014 during Photography Playground.

Next exhibitions:
Photography Playground, Opernwerkstatten, Berlin April 10th  - May 25th 2014
Micro/Macro, Gare St Sauveur, Lille, Sept 1-15th 2014

The piece I presented is a light and sound sculpture whose elements are suspended in mid-airspace, and fragmented in a space. This dynamic layout offers different points of view and perspective according to the position of the spectator.
The structure was in the center of the room, and filled a 13 m2 surface and a 3m height.

“White roads in the red matrix” is in continuation of my artistic commitment over the past few years, but this time with a more “structural” approach, as opposed to my work based on still or moving images, but again with the same focus of deconstruction. A selection of my deconstruction series can be found on my blog WYSI*not*YYG, while series based around the theme of time are visible on Deconstruction Time, Again.

While doing some research around the deconstruction theme, I had to create fragments, which would always be rectangles, the main geometrical shape I’ve been obsessed with for years, the core material of the work. But this time I wanted to have an even more radical approach.

The outcome of this research is a spread of fragments in space, a floating matrix  animated in time by sound and light.

The installation is made of 14 elements of red semi-translucent Plexiglas and six  aluminium structure with embedded LEDs.

These elements can be lit up independently, and synchronized with a sound design  that brings the temporal dimension of the work. Thomas Vaquié worked on the sound design, and created two main sound ‘colors’ to reflect the each of the two materials’ singularity. The sound is then made of 44 different sounds, and the challenge was to create melodic and harmonious.combinations from these elements.

Part of the structure was projection mapped, and projectors were used to contrasts with the sharp lighting of LEDs, and the visuals were developped with VVVV. The software will allow future development of an interactive version of the piece.

Olivier Ratsi : design / Thomas Vaquié : sound design / Anthony Gouvrillon : software development / Julien Guinard : LED development

Thank you to Elektra team, Gilles Alvarez, Julien Taib, Cedric Huchet, Nicolas Rosette – Support by Arcadi, Théâtre de l’Agora and Stereolux. 

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the 3Destruct project soundtrack. This version was composed during a residency at l’Usine Lu, in Nantes (FR),  inside an old factory warehouse. You can find the full length video report and more details in a blog post by Yannick Jacquet, who produced the visual content with the help of Jérémie Peeters.

“COMB”, Thomas Vaquie. This version is a stereo edit of the piece originally produced for a 7 channel system.

This extract is the second part of the piece which was articulated around 3 movements. I started the composition once the visual narrative and dynamics were developed by Yannick Jacquet and Jeremie Peeters. From there i decided to go for a frame based approach to composition and editing and synched every frame over a final video edit. Inspiration had to be found solely in the visual dynamics of those simple visual elements, vectors.

The physical structure of the installation is made of thin vertical stripes of material. This specific canvas created a strong direction for the general aesthetics of the piece. Also, a large part of the piece being based around the idea of streaks pattern, the use of “comb filters” to slice the space both sonically and visually became an obvious choice. And finally for the name of the track.

Streaks pattern, part of the piece aesthetics inspired by the physical structure of 3Destruct.

The 3Destruct video has just been nominated for the vimeo awards in the captured category, please show your support.  You can vote once a day until the 30th of April.
https://vimeo.com/awards/vote/captured

The installation will be touring more this year, keep an eye on the website.

Thomas.

This project began shortly after Imandril contacted me via facebook to tell me he like my work and would love to work with me in the future. After this first contact, I visited his website to see his work that I didn’t know before. I fell in admiration of his mastery of drawing, composing and his preciseness. I very appreciated his detailed cityscape so precise that you can zoom into almost indefinitely as a fractal. Though using different techniques of expression, I immediately saw that our works are both heavily influenced by architecture and I immediately imagined a possible collaboration.

We wanted to mix our artistic practices to achieve this project that blends 3D animation and drawing. To do this we used the technique of “2D mapping” or “reverse mapping”. (An article in this blog is planed in a near future to explain this technique). One of the pioneers of this technique is Joanie Lemercier he use it in several personal project like “Live Painting – Shackleton”. Before this project I had not really experienced this technique which I like very much. This collaboration was the perfect opportunity

The idea was to show the passing of a day in an imaginary city in fast-forward. We wanted to puts the spectator at the summit of a tower facing a huge “world city”. We wanted to mix various architectural influences to create a dystopian city strangely familiar but impossible to locate. Thomas Vaquié made the sound design to enforces this « disturbing strangeness »

Mandrill and I really like science fiction and anticipation tale. We were quite inspired by movies like Blade Runner, Amer Beton, The 5th Element or book as 1984 (George Orwel), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury), The Città Invisibili (Italo Calvino) and many more

The project was presented for the first time at the “Mapping Festival” of Geneva in May 2011.

Legoman (3D animation)
Mandril (drawing)
Thomas Vaquie (sound design)

Shot and edited by Jerome Monnot
(additional footage by Yannick Jacquet)

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

As I’ve been following the FLIM sessions for a while now, I was really happy to be invited to the november edition (the main musical act was Deadbeat – that made me even happier), and I imagined 2 structures with a simple design that could be hanged both over the stage and the VJ booth. The 2 structures were mapped with the great Millumin software (be sure to check it out at http://millumin.com/) and the visuals played live with modul8 (routed through Millumin via Syphon). The idea was to stick to the minimal aesthetic of FLIM, with only white lines creating patterns on the structure, with bits of 3D graphics from time to time. Similar visuals were projected on a curved wall and on a small stucture made with semi-transparent screens.

View from Millumin’s interface with grid warping enabled.

Many thanks to Kristoffer Karlsson for inviting me, Johan Holm for helping with the construction, and all the people involved in the project.

For more info: FLIM Stockholm / Facebook & www.romaintardy.com

/ Romain

Even if he had some ideas in mind: sketches, drawings, and inspiring visuals from Nosaj artworks, he decided to restart the project from scratch after spending some time at the meatfactory, and to design the structure while being in the actual venue, and then make this project completely in-situ.

 Material used were paper and pens, wood, foam, paste, light and a computer.

The result is a wooden structure covered by more than 500 polystyrene triangles, blended with a layer of light. This installation completely fades out the boundaries between a DJ booth, a sculpture, a three-dimensional screen, and traditional lighting.

Romain named it Triangles, triangles, triangles (ad lib).

One great thing about all these new “post-VJing” formats, is the fact that the work of the artist is not just video-content-production-and-live-mixing anymore, but it can now be a cross over between many disciplines, such as object design, 3d modelling, physical construction of structures, and you can end up working with carpenters, architects, designers, light artists..

Great to see many people get more interest in these new approaches to live visuals, and Romain’s work had a great follow up from Wired, Computer love, fastcodesign (who actually thinks Romain is Nosaj Thing), and many blogs with different interests and focuses.

The Lunchmeat team did a great work at documenting their event ! Here’s a short film about the residency and evolution of Romain’s project, and you can also find online a film about the festival itself, and many things their offered over a couple of days.

You can also find more projects from Romain Tardy on his new website.

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’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
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Here’s a short extract of the performance:

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