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.

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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Obviously you can’t see the 3D effect on a regular computer screen, but we’re touring with a special screen, so come and see the show to experience the Depth of 3D stereoscopic visuals.

This is just a really short preview of the show, more will be coming soon…

Music: myspace.com/principlesofgeometry
Visual production: Joanie Lemercier, Simon Geilfus,  Desaxismundi.
Produced with support from Arcadi.

Upcoming shows:
- Nov 14th – Belo Horizonte – Brazil
- Nov 17th – Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
- Nov 19th – Sao Paulo – Brazil
- April 2010 – Paris

www.antivj.com/pog/

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.

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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:

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

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

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

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.

We now work in a really nice open space at Pervasive Media studio, with a large desk do to origamis, models and mess around with techy gadgets, a meeting space, to plan projects and discuss ideas, and a wonderful chillout area, to read magazines, relax and play Wii..

We share the space with HP labs, BBC, winners of the Media SandBox grant and freelancers, and it’s an amazing opportunity to share ideas and start collaborations with other creative people involved in similar projects.

So if you are interesting in working with us, or want to discuss a visual project, drop us a line and feel free to come down for a tea.. We are just between the Imax cinema and the planetarium.

By the way we also have meeting spaces in Brussels and Paris, so if you’re not in UK we can arrange something anyway.

Many thanks to Clare Reddington and Emma Scott, Pervasive Media Studio, and Ished for making it happened, and for taking us out of our small home studio.