It has taken the Franco-Swiss artist Yannick Jacquet three years to create Élytre, a forty-metre-long generative work on display at the foot of the the Alexander III bridge in Paris. The piece was commissioned as a permanent design feature for Le Flow, a floating building moored along the new pedestrian area on the banks of the Seine.

Yannick Jacquet drew inspiration from the dark mass of the barge between the sky and the river to fine-tune his response to the immediate surroundings, calling on the instability and permanence of the flowing water, the infinitely nuanced shifts of light, and the interplay of transparencies between its large plate-glass windows and the glass dome of the Grand Palais just across the water. Drawing on the barge’s organic, cocoon-like architecture, he came up with a highly sensitive, reactive work in the form of an installation that reverses the overall structural inertia of the barge’s four hundred tons of steel, as if echoing Reyner Banham’s principle of regenerative architecture.

The installation is linked up to a battery of sensors so that it varies according to the time of year, season, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, temperature, and so on. It is in a constant state of flux, permanently subject to imperceptible shifts. As a generative work, it has its own dedicated, custom made software programme and required the artist to work closely with a team of specialists in engineering, craft manufacture, electronics, programming, and architecture.

As night falls, the work softly rises up into the surrounding cityscape. The impression on the viewer’s retinas is deep and lasting. The colourful stimuli of elements emerging and fading seem to mirror the shimmering river and foliage and mimic the circadian rhythm of breathing. The artist also devoted considerable research to the issue of colour. A metal mesh with its own unique structure is fastened over the cladding from the roof to the hull, creating a pointillist effect by means of an infinite palette of pixels. The material resists the quantity of light and contrast: the artist has sought to create nuances and shadings of colour by pushing LEDs beyond their usual capacities.

Yannick Jacquet explains that the installation is part of a broader project exploring cycles and our relationship with time. The work is designed less as an invitation to a journey as an order to slow down. To take the time for contemplation.

Elytre in 6 stone-cold facts:
957 custom-made Leds sections
789 micro perforated sunshield panels
340 different sizes
372 universes of lighting information
4 weather instruments
1 cinder application

> Making of  & Artist interview:

Concept, design, animation: Yannick Jacquet
Producer: Nicolas Boritch Label: Antivj
Software: Eric Renaud-Houde, Simon Geilfus
Hardware engineering: LedPXL

Elytre – video teaser: https://vimeo.com/channels/antivj/225525522

Making of credits: Camera: Corentin Kopp, James Medcraft – Editing: Corentin Kopp – Music: Thomas Vaquié
Pictures by James Medcraft

Remote Memories is a new project by Yannick Jacquet, in collaboration with composer Laurent Delforge (Before Tigers). Remote Memories is a polyptych in panoramic format, a large canvas of video and sound. This highly pictorial work resists immediate apprehension; rather it needs to be observed a moment, contemplated in order to grasp its minor details. Textures are superimposed and interlaced, creating atmospheres that vibrate with neither line nor contour – a sort of “sfumato video.” The image that seems fixed at first is criss-crossed by almost imperceptible waves, like a brownian movement that shakes a gas’s particles. Glimmers, colours, shapes unknown or anxious seem to emerge and disappear as if glimpsed through thick fog.

Remote Memories from ANTIVJ is a visual label on Vimeo.

The soundtrack broadcasted through a series of 11 vibration speakers makes use of the canvas’ wooden panels as a sound box. Just like its visual counterpart, it is composed of vibrant textures superimposed on one another and creating a “drone” that alternates between brooding moods and more luminous sounds.

There is no question of audio-reactivity here since the images and sounds evolve at their own rhythm, mixing, losing ground, drifting, letting chance and coincidence create new interactions endlessly.

The installation Remote Memories invites the gaze to pause and apprehend the impossibility of immobility in an age where data is overabundant.

Remote Memories & the Six Cycles Orchestra – performance view

Remote Memories & the Six Cycles Orchestra

Remote Memories & the Six Circles Orchestra is a performance work adapted from the installation Remote Memories.

Before Tigers (Laurent Delforge) uses 6 turntables to play a collection of custom-made handcut vinyls with locked grooves, conjuring up an abstract composition by adding in or stripping out harmonies and textures to paint a soundscape in conversation with the work’s visual element. Images and sounds develop at their own unique rhythm as the sound and visual loops form intricate layers, intertwine, shift, and fall out of sync, triggering in nite new interactions at random.

The musical composition is spatialised by means of a unique setup combining standard speakers and transducers, or vibrating speakers, creating an echo chamber that encompasses the screen polyptych and the surrounding space. The installation and the live performance explore the tensions engendered by a certain conception of slowness, inviting the viewer to engage in contemplation.

Over the last few years, Yannick Jacquet’s twofold research into colour and the notions of time and natural cycles has led him to flesh out a new paradigm: slowness. Slowness as one possible path to the urgently needed restoration of sensibility.

Remote Memories (installation + performance)
Scopitone festival, Nantes (Fr)
20-24 September

More dates to be announced soon.

Ecume is a collection of musical works originally written by Thomas Vaquié for the Antivj visual label.
These are all derivations of compositions for site-specific and installation projects, the original pieces having been created as a response to place and space, to light and architecture, to code and motion. Now separated and transformed from their original context, the music takes on an independent existence in these new realisations.

Ecume is the first release on Antivj Recordings, a new platform dedicated to music originally composed for installation work.

The idea of a record label focusing on music originating from transdisciplinary hybrid installation work was born several years ago from the realisation that detailed narrative-driven work, often composed with or for image, also had the capacity to exist by itself, outside its original physical/visual context. It grew out of being confronted with, and inspired by composers and sound designers experimenting with new forms of narrative and creating physical, visual and emotional sonic work, in a singular and honest way. Thomas Vaquié, Murcof, Laurent Delforge and the many other artists exploring similar fields are without a doubt some of the inspiration behind Antivj Recordings.

At a time when music seems to be forced (too often and too hard it feels) to be augmented or justified by visual impact, Antivj Recordings wants to reafirm the capacity held within the medium of sound itself to feed the imagination. In the time of attention-deficit Antivj Recordings wants to believe in making time and space for active listening.  In a digital age, Antivj Recordings wants to release physical objects, carefully crafted, that may take the form of a vinyl, a plate built in concrete, a 3D printed object, an audio book or an application.

ECUME – GATEFOLD DOUBLE LP EDITION

two 180g vinyls
gatefold with matt laminate soft touch finish

ECUME – LIMITED RESIN-CAST EDITION 

A very limited boxset edition, designed and handmade at our studios.
Edition of 25, each a unique hand crafted piece, casted from the original concrete-mould created for the album artwork.

Boxset includes:
- 33cm x 33cm dark resin-cast plate, in relief. aluminium profiles for wall-mounting.
- gatefold double vinyl LP edition

ANTIVJ RECORDINGS LAUNCH – ECUME EXHIBITION

Last week-end, for the official launch of Antivj Recordings, a docile crowd was plunged into total darkness at our Brussels studios for about an hour for a listening session of the full Ecume album.

This was also an opportunity to share some insights on the work process behind the artwork of the album, created by Yannick Jacquet. The series of objects below remain on display until September at our studios (please see at the bottom for details).

THE ARTWORK PROCESS

How could the original matter of Ecume (soundwaves) be somehow turned into something physical, tangible?

Ecume is available now at Antivj Recordings in all 3 editions: double vinyl, limited boxset and digital.

All music written, performed and mixed by Thomas Vaquié
Label : Antivj Recordings
Executive producer : Nicolas Boritch
Artwork : Yannick Jacquet
Audio visualisation tool : Simon Geilfus.
Premastering by Shawn Hatfield at AudibleOddities
Video teaser filmed by Nico Neefs & edited by Yannick Jacquet.
Thanks to Duncan Speakman for his words, to Sebastien Robert & Paul Thomas for helping with promo.

“Ecume est pour la personne qui m’est si chère et qui aimait tant la mer.”

© 2016 Antivj recordings ℗ Antivj recordings

Ecume – artwork exhibition
Antivj studios, 30-34 quai des charbonnages, 1080 Bruxelles.
June 17th – September 18th 2016

“While the passage of time seems to accelerate every day, Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet offer a pause, a suspension, a breath. A strange mechanism stretches across the wall, populated with shadowy chimeras. They are mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Is this a laboratory experiment or the plan for a future network?
Minutely constructed like a fine clock, it traces connections, routes, genuinely-false, looping itineraries, inviting escape, inviting dreams. The narrative is deconstructed like a thousand-storied film script. Every effort is made to lead astray, to turn around, to forge ahead. Time is shredded, decomposed, lost…and yet everything references it.
Mécaniques Discursives is like a parenthesis between two epochs: Gutenberg’s and Big Data’s. By contrasting the oldest form of image reproduction (woodcutting) with the most recent digital technologies, the installation straddles centuries and contracts time.”

Certain artistic collaborations seem self-evident, a synthesis that transcends practice and brings out the best of each individual. The Mécaniques Discursives project, which we’ve been working on since 2011, derives from such an intense collaboration. Three years of research and experimentation, accompanied by twenty exhibitions across Europe and Asia, have allowed us to continually perfect our infernal machines.
After these numerous exhibitions, we thought it would be interesting to take stock of our collaborative practice by filming a documentary that presents the project from behind the scenes and explains, in part, the thought processes and research that underpin it.

The future direction of the project has already been set: engines and physical movements have recently been added to our vocabulary as the installation becomes more sculptural, particularly through the integration of wrought-metal animated elements.

An exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts gave us the opportunity to develop our project as a polyptych. We will be continuing to explore different, smaller standalone formats alongside the in-situ installation.

From the end of December until March 2015 a new site specific version of the project will be presented at Lux (Scène Nationale) in Valence, France. We will exhibit a very large version of the installation, taking over two floors of the building. We hope it will mark the first in a series of large-scale installations.

Yannick Jacquet, Fred Penelle

Prizes
- Winner of the Milano Design Week Tech Award as part of the Timescapes exhibition
- Winner of the Art Collector’s Prize – Slick Art fair 2013 / Brussels / B

Past exhibitions (selected)

- National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts / Wonder of Fantasy / Taichung / TW / 2014
- Milano Design Week / Spazio Logotel / Milano / IT / 2014
- Digital Choc 2014 / Institut français du Japon / Tokyo / JP / 2014
- Atsuko Barouh Gallery / Tokyo / JP / 2014
- Nuit Blanche Metz / F /2013
- LKFF Art & Sculpture Projects Gallery / Brussels / B / 2013
- Slick Art fair / Brussels / B / 2013
- EMAF / Osnabrueck / D / 2013
- Nemo / Paris / F / 2012
- Bozar Electronic Festival / Brussels / B /2012
- Scopitone / Nantes / F /2012
- Mapping Festival / Geneva / CH /2012

More info at: www.antivj.com/md
Contact: hello(at)antivj.com

While gardens are an expression of the relationship between nature and culture, mostly seen as an idealized landscape subjected to the shaping powers of culture and deprived of their own principles of ecology, the garden in Oaxaca seems untameable. Its wild diversity is an image of all ethnic groups, indigenous languages and species of plants that found here a favourable oasis. The arrangement of the garden reflects the natural history of cultivation and creates a polemical encounter between the garden’s rather “nationalist” character and the arched windows of the monastery, an expression of alien colonists. The location turns into a living canvas and mediates our contemplation on the relationship with nature, environment, the passage of time, the spectres of being and our illuminating beliefs.

The garden in Oaxaca is a microcosm the artists use to unveil the region’s endemic flora and to create a continuous experience out of the artistic format, one that may enables visitors to gain a deeper understanding of human interaction with the environment.

“We liked the idea of trying to create a trail” says Nicolas Boritch, “(…) of developing an ephemeral experience in such a unique space. A place which had never been opened to the public at night before.”
The artists’ use of an immersive experience through several site specific installations generates a physical and psychological journey, but it also transforms materials and the environment into a magic geography where matter becomes object and space is refined as a wild territory of organic forms, light and technology. The trails of light become trails of the senses through which visitors can resonate with ancestral techniques, nature, technology, and a mystical experience of the world. While the curative mythologies and practices man creates to ensure his grasp over nature are an attempt to command its wild forces, the artists were interested “in letting the spectators glimpse and hear the hidden world behind each plant, rock and construction there”, says Thomas Vaquié. “We approached this idea of a garden trail as a dream. Even though each piece could work separately, it was important for us to build the trail as a journey, so that people might enter and exit with a sense of continuity. To give them the impression that they never left the dream.”

The succession of installations unveils the layered perception of space and dimension. In Olivier Ratsi’s Onion Skin, the physical dimension of the two walls positioned at right angles is augmented by light projections. The resemblence to a half-open book is an invitation to a journey through its chapters, but it is also a psychological preparation for the garden trail. “Onion Skin is based on the principle of alignment”, says Ratsi. “In our case, the alignment of three points: the module, the projection and the audience. When the spectator is perfectly aligned with the other two, a new dimension is revealed through anamorphosis.” The installation is a light graphology that reveals the progressive structure of space, time and perception through various recompositions. Repetition and scale are used to create a physical, hypnotic and dream-like experience based on geometric elements, the illusion of a new dimension and a play of light spectres. A 5.1 surround sound set-up accentuates the physical dimension and creates volume to this perspective. Like a door unto the realm of a parallel world, Onion Skin guides the visitors through the garden, where small installations are spread out across the paths that lead to the yet-unseen The Ark.

Romain Tardy’s cacti piece creates a cultural and symbolic bridge linking heterogeneous moments into a shared continuum. As the visitor approaches the installation, he is progressively immersed into its core, where shapes of light and whispering sounds draw him towards the main scene. The architectural setting, “formed by cacti which separated the space into two unavoidable chambers of perception, allows the visitors to view the installation from different angles”, says Laurent Delforge. “The idea of playing with multi-sided space became a thread in the narrative construction of the piece.”

The Ark is a contextual installation. It uses plants as a visual canvas but also as living beings embodying an individual presence coherently integrated into nature as the unity of multiple living entities. Yet the installation was not an attempt to reach “a pristine symbiosis between nature and technology”, says Delforge. “The idea was more to create a peculiar encounter.” The trail of light is an expression of the collision between nature and technology, but its luminous matter also deals with memory and recollection. The magic of light activates our recollection. Immersed in this environment, the visitor takes an illuminating mental journey to regain memory as light.

As visitors walk past the cacti installation, guided by distant lowing lights and subterranean sounds only, an open space reveals 3Destruct | Oaxaca pulsating behind thick vegetation.

The last piece, Réplica, which is set along a straight and rocky path going to the exit, acts as a recollection, using sonic textures and musical parts previously heard along the trail. The garden thus transforms into a magic place of illumination. It spotlights the history of the place, with plants being arranged by ecological and cultural themes, but it also enlightens a personal, curative experience.

The artists create a magic geography on the border between dream, psychedelia and an elevated state of consciousness. It is based on a play with scales, light and matter that reflects upon natural, archetypal and constructed forms. Yet it is hard to describe this work singularly. As Manuel Alacala, Proyecta’s content director, justly observes, it is something visceral that goes beyond experimental cinema and could rather define terms such as future film. The journey through the magic garden is a physical and imaginary exploration of a layered space and multiple experiences through which visitors reach refined mental geographies.

Text by Sabin Bors, curator at anti-utopias.com

The trail consisted of the following four works:
Onion Skin, by Olivier Ratsi, music by Thomas Vaquié
The Ark, by Romain Tardy & Squeaky Lobster
3Destruct | Oaxaca, by Yannick Jacquet, Thomas Vaquié & Jeremie Peeters
Réplica, by Laurent Delforge & Thomas Vaquié

All projects managed by Nicolas Boritch

Proyecta festival: 
Content director: Manuel Alcala
Producer: Samuel Rivera
Technical director: Azael Saenz

Inspiration.

After a few brainstorming sessions with the rest of the team, it appeared pretty quickly that we were going to work with themes inspired by the breathtaking differences in scale found in nature. When looking at the curves of the architecture, the idea of flow came immediately to mind and we started looking into the idea of the sea and the crazy organisms that populate it. I did some research on deep sea organisms and found a couple of articles about the paleodictyon nodosum, its incredible habitat and supposedly faculties for bacteria farming. Without getting too much into details here, the similarities that we found between these organisms and Shigeru Ban’s architecture seemed to be too much of a coincidence not to be looked at.

Our storyboard gave me some pretty clear leads on how to build the the software upon. I had to come up with visual and technical solutions to make our ideas possible. Ideas like this concept of multiple individuals creating, on a higher scale, a big complex organism or this idea of “skin” being a structure constantly rearranging itself in reaction to different stimuli, and so forth… From that point it was kind of easy to see that I was going to play around with agents, particles and group behaviour. But since we’d all been experimenting a lot with these themes in the last decade I really wanted to try to push this further. I had to find a way to make it more interesting for me and not just to create an nth Craig Reynolds’s Steering behaviors implementation.

From storyboard to software.

Instead of hard-coding a particle system as I usually would, I decided that it was time to have a more modular approach to designing particle animation, and invested quite some time trying to find the right solution in terms of usability and creative possibilities. I might have been wrong but it was pretty clear to me at the time that in order to achieve this i would need a good user interface.

I quickly implemented a typical scene explorer, similar to the ones you find in most graphic softwares, and came up with some easy-to-use code to create new objects that could be added to a scene. Having the hierarchies that a scene graph can offer allowed me to design a number of objects and re-arrange at will how those objects could influence each other. I quickly decided to limit myself to a small number of object types per scene. Particle groups, particle behaviour and effectors felt like a good starting points to build what I wanted. It kind of summarized quite well those ideas of internal/external world and stimuli that we had in our storyboard.

Complexification.

When it comes to programming physical processes, I’ve always been fascinated by how combining different layers of complexity can be so powerful. Each layer bringing its new set of rules and surprises. Combining can sometimes result in something greater than the sum of their parts, and that is where interesting and unexpected things can happen.

Usually the first layer that I play with gives each particle different properties, sizes, masses or shapes. “Press play” and see what happens, what kind of interesting patterns or animations emerge when exploring with those different parameters. Sometimes it does really feel like putting your finger into a Petri dish just to see what might happen.

Another layer that I wanted to add was the ability to create separated group of particles and apply behaviours or constraints to a group rather than to every single individual. This layer may seem quite simple or obvious at first, but it allowed for some really nice things to happen, and helped a lot to create complex interactions between particles. Make a small group act like a flock of fish and another one more as a fluid and you already have some nice interactions.

That is where the design that I chose (keeping particle properties, behaviours and constraints as separated concepts) came really handy. Playing with particles and giving them different properties, sizes and shapes is always interesting, but the fun really starts when you can mix different groups of behaviours together.

Timeline animation.

Why bother with coded animation when you can do it with a timeline? This might seems trivial but the level of complexity increased quite drastically when I added a time dimension to those two layers.

I knew that injecting any animated data into a physical simulation can often lead to surprising results but still I was really amazed to see how changing those behaviours over time would create such unexpected reactions. Anyone who has played with Craig Reynolds’s Steering behaviors knows how a small set of rules can create such compelling animations, even if none of the rules parameters are animated. Well if you are that kind of person, then you can probably imagine how animating those parameters can create such surprisingly organic and complex animations. This system helped me to create the different reactions that we wanted for our living organism, like skin contraction and dilatation, structure’s construction, re-organisation and deconstruction, and other organic animations. This was already a big part of our idea of an organism reacting to external stimuli. Here are a couple of examples of that “ever-changing state” structure:

Node Graph and sound design.

There was quite a lot of ping-pong between our composer, Thomas Vaquié and myself. More than ever, the music that he wrote influenced our approach to visual production. More than just a highly collaborative way of working together , we wanted to give the music a real literal role in the piece, making it one of the actual inputs in our (eco)system, like the very stimuli I was talking about previously. The music became quickly the main antagonist in our story, attracting/repelling those organisms, controlling their every move. It also helped a lot to structure our narrative around the birth, life and death of this weird organism, and even led up to an interesting new aspect, that of the balance between two other worlds, light and darkness.

This is one of the reasons why we needed that strong symbiosis between music and visuals. The last few years I’ve been experimenting a lot with audio and particles systems as part of my ongoing collaboration with Murcof and I really wanted to try something new in terms of creation and experimentation possibilities. This is where a node graph came really handy, allowing me to visually route any part of the audio to any part of the visual/physical system. When you are used to re-design the code every time you want the music to influence a part of the animation, well, a user interface like this one is definitely a huge time saver and gives much more space for experimentation.

Stimuli and working with motion designers.

From the start, it was pretty clear that Yannick was going to focus on the more graphical and geometric parts of the piece, and that I would be taking care of the procedural and organic parts. Instead of giving a 4 week old software full of bugs to Yannick, I decided to put my efforts on building bridges between my software and the ones that Yannick would be using. In order to develop fully our story it was really important for us to make those two worlds meet, fight and live together, not only in terms of collaboration and compositing techniques but also conceptually.

I decided to look into computer vision to find simple ways to work with Yannick’s footage rather than the other way around. I built an OpenCV module that was taking care of analysing Yannick’s videos and extracting interesting data that I could use for my animations. This idea gave birth to a nice list of new effects, some of them would extract the polygons out of videos to create collisions, some other would use grayscale gradients to influence the strength of another effect, etc…

It ended up being a really powerful tool, allowing me to use those graphical animation to physically collide with particles, scaring them off or attracting them. And after a few tweaks to the computer vision engine the result was quite convincing. I could just click one button, import new videos, assign them to different effects and, voila, please meet interactive physical compositing!

This module was the last piece I added to the software. Because time is often the main constraint for that kind of project, especially when you are the lead and only developer, there’s always a moment when you have to stop building new toys and start playing with the one you already have!

Artistic direction by Simon Geilfus, Yannick Jacquet, Thomas Vaquié
Producer Nicolas Boritch
Visual content by Simon Geilfus, Yannick Jacquet, Romain Tardy
Music composed by Thomas Vaquié

Header photohraph by James Medcraft.

You can find more information and pictures about the project here.

The software that I built for this project was made possible thanks to the huge efforts and energy of Andrew Bell, the Barbarians and the amazing Cinder community. A big thanks to the whole team for creating such a powerful framework! Cinder rules!

I used Gwen GUI to build the user interface, Gwen is a small library written by Garry Newman, and it is definitely worth having a look at it! I started playing with this library several months before this project and had to hack it quite a lot to make the timeline and nodegraph widgets possible, but it is without any doubt a really nice piece of code!

Post written by Simon Geilfus

I was first invited in 2007, before AntiVJ existed, and since then we’ve been invited almost every year to show our more recent work, which really helped us to develop the label:

2007: – early version of my light sculptures series.
           – First time I saw 3Destruct live.
2008: New light sculpture with Romain Tardy, Olivier Ratsi and Yannick Jacquet.
2010: St Gervais, by Yannick Jacquet and Thomas Vaquié
2011: Cityscape, by Yannick Jacquet, Mandril and Thomas Vaquié.

This year I was invited to show my volcano piece (don’t ask me to pronounce its name). I haven’t had time yet to blog about it, and about the reverse mapping technique, but here’s a short documentary that explains the project.

It took me about 2 days to do the actual drawing (you could follow it almost realtime here).
I’m still not 100% happy with the visual result, and I’m looking for a residency to finally make some new parts and get the volcano obsession out of my mind, but I can feel I’m slowly getting there.

I wrote an article for CreativeApplications to explain the research and creative aspects behind the project.

             

“Mécaniques Discursives”
Being at the mapping was also an opportunity for me to see the new installation by Yannick Jacquet and Fred Penelle, it’s a project they develop outside of the label, and I was really looking forward to see it in person.
I will post more about it tomorrow.

Projecting onto the Parthénon.
On Sunday I did projection mapping workshop with teenagers, and we mapped a piece of the Parthenon, and used a new 3D scanning technique.
I’ll post more information about it in the next few days !

Our first permanent mapping.
I also did a presentation, and it was an opportunity to show the video of Omicron, our first permanent projection mapping piece on an incredible location, a 70m wide concrete dome built 100 years ago, and protected by Unesco. The piece was directed by Romain Tardy and Thomas Vaquié.
Keep an eye on the blog, the release is imminent.

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/

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- 3DESTRUCT
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