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.

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

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. 

=============================
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:

A new very exciting project ! Some Bristolian creative agencies are teaming up to produce and project moving images on the council house building during the week before christmas.

2006
The Lightup Bristol project started last year, with some still images projections designed by Aardman Animations, Play Nicely, Watershed, and the organisers were interested in having me on board after seeing my mapping technique on Youtube (mapping on my neighbours house).

A few pictures from last year event:

There will be an afterparty at the end of the week, Cuisine, the 21st of december at Timbuk2.

Probably the best “visual festival” ever…

The team behind the VJ Software “Modul8” organised in Geneva the third edition of Mapping,  their audio-visual festival: a great audio lineup (including the amazings Birdy Nam Nam) and a very dense program, with exhibition, VJ sets, talks and workshops.

The festival took place mainly in 2 venues: the BAC (Contemporary Art Builbing) with installations, ehxibition and talks during the day, and le Zoo, and great club for events during the two weekends.
A great atmosphere, and a very good opportunity to meet other visual artists, and talk with a very unusual audience at the BAC (kids and grannies..).
I did a Workshop about the Wiimote to Midi, a VJ set for the D&B night, and a mapping on some large cubes built by Cube3, from Geneva.

Here are a few pictures of the Cube mapping (some of them with Clandestine from Montreal):

View the slideshow.

My highlights were: 3Destruct AV installation by Lego_man and some friends, an immersive 3 dimensions piece, very impressive and a real experience.
Exyzt did a nice installation at the Bac, and an interesting VJ set with Wireless live cam.
Clandestine did a nice A/V set with pheek, with hypnotic minimal geometric shapes, messing up with color perception, and retinal persistence..

Also, very good stuff from Narrative Labs, V-scratch, Sigma6, Quayola and many more..
More infos on the mapping’s blog, and some great pictures by Ork.

Many thanks to Boris and to the Modul8 crew, who did such a nice work, and booked great artists, pushing forward visual art..

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.

I finally have a bit of time these days to post some news about the tour.. It started really well with a VJ set for a Breaks gig at the Batofar in Paris, where they had an all new video setup, thanks to the resident VJs, Qualityscreen and VJ Eye. I only managed to take one picture, as I was pretty busy trying to get my wiimote to work..

Then after a few days in Rennes, my hometown, I headed to Lille for Paysages Electroniques, a great festival founded by 2 VJs, Céline et Jérôme from zelabo. The audio lineup was pretty cool, with a Mutek night with Akufen, also Yuksek, Cuizinier, and the visual booking was wicked, with probably the best VJ lineup I’ve seen so far (or at least my favorite).

Among the highlights:
- The Audio visual performance: Aviorama from MFO (his vjset at clubTransmediale in January was already impressive) his a “must see” in the few good A/V acts. The 12:3 Multiprojection was also very effective !
- Sanchtv, performed for the first time on a superwide 4 screens setup. He also solved the technical problems we had when he came at cuisine #4, by buying a realtime-processing monster, which allows a 4096×768 render at 60fps with vvvv. Here are his Blog posts before and after the festival.
- Aalto and Ratsi played on sunday, both with their very personnal style and self-produced material, and did a great use of the 2X 8:3 format (thanks to the vga scaler) and did a “jam” at the end, mixing and melting their visuals..

I did a mapping installation, using some strange furniture of the club to project on. It was actually a bit tricky, as the room was very bright during the day, but I finally managed to do the mapping and work on some minimal visuals. My first installation with projections of all the sides of the cubes, I’ll probably carry on this way, to actually “skin” object..

Huge thanks to zelabo for doing such a great event and for the perfect organisation !

Here are more pictures of the festival:

Hello ! Petite vidéo d’une expérimentation sur le mur du voisin, de l’autre côté de la rue..
L’idée vient de la vidéo “projection monumentale” postée par Uruk sur VJfrance: projections de visuels 3D sur batîments, des avec masques pour travailler en complémentarité avec l’architecture du lieu.

J’ai beaucoup aimé la technique, et en particulier le détourage d’éléments avec des formes simples, et j’ai voulu essayer à mon tour, mais en live, et à base d’éléments plutôt minimaux (formes et détourages), calés sur de l’electronica click’n cut qui fonctionne particulierement bien avec ce type d’install.

Technique: J’ai utilisé mes 2 softs habituels Flash + Arkaos. Laptop, clavier midi (pour le calage live) et projecteur 2300lum.

Résultat en vidéo:

Pour ceux qui seront du côté de Rennes le 14 octobre, je pense faire une install similaire quelques part dans les rues de la ville, pour une labtop session à l’occasion du festival electroni-k, puis à Bristol, Londres et Berlin courant novembre.
Je vous tiens au courant.