Once again we’ve been rather busy lately and this blog has been very quiet, but we settled down a bit last month to put together some reports about a couple of projects we did last year.
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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AntiVJ has been working on a new format for French retro-futurist electronic producers Principles of Geometry. Using stereoscopy (technology used in IMAX cinemas to watch visuals with 3D glasses) they produced a 50min long real-time journey through space. An exciting experience and a real visual counterpart to the band’s space/epic soundtrack.

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/

After loads of travels and events abroad, I had a chance to get some rest for a couple of weeks, and stay a bit around Bristol..  I also realized that I haven’t played ‘at home’ for a while, so I was really pleased when I’ve been asked to do some visuals for a Dubstep night at the Croft, which is the place where I did my very first VJ set when I moved to UK, back in 2004.

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.

Crea composite and AntiVJ teamed up to produce a short ”son et lumière” show for Nuit Blanche Bruxelles on the 4th of October.

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:

Hi there !

I’ve been away from this blog for a while, busy with new projects, editing videos, preparing the new year, and I didn’t have a chance to stop until now..
Great news, I’m proud to announce that we’re about to launch AntiVJ, a new visual label, which is a platform to produce projects based on the visual element. This project is a collaboration with some artists I really like. We became friends and realized we are sharing the same ideas and vision of our work, so we decided the collaborate more put a name on it.

AntiVJ is a visual label initiated by European-based artists whose work is focused on the use of projected light and its influence on our perception.

Clearly stepping away from standard setups & techniques, AntiVJ presents live performances and installations where projection on volume, visual mapping, tracking and augmented reality, stereoscopy and holographic illusion are providing to the audience a senses challenging experience.

Visual artists on the label:

Yannick Jacquet (Legoman).
Joanie Lemercier (crustea).
Olivier Ratsi (Emovie).
Romain Tardy (Aalto).

Here’s a short video : AntiVJ Teaser 08 featuring recent projects:

++++ Le Mans (France), August 2007
3Destruct Louvain la neuve (Belgium), June 07
Inode Nancy (France), December 07
Light up Bristol Bristol (UK), December 07

Video report from ClubTransmediale in Berlin.

Following the A/V set I did at the M12 gallery during Avit Berlin, the venue owners, visomat.inc, asked me to do some similar visual mapping for an installation at ClubTransmediale, a great clubnight and festival at clubMaria, with visuals, workshops, interactive stuff..

So I came back to Berlin a month later, at the end of January, to spend a week the German capital and collaborate with visomat to animate and enlight the minimal sculpture they prepared..
As this year festival’s theme was “Building Space“, the idea was to create visuals during the event, and explore the links between space, volume, depth and light.

Here’s a short video of the installation and the visuals projected:

Highres version – Download – Pictures

More details and Pictures on antivj.com

This project has probably been one of my most interesting and inspiring so far, many thanks to clubtransmediale and visomat.