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.

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.

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

The french strikes didn’t really help (no public transport in France that day), and it’s been a long journey: bus, plane, lift to Rennes (thanks Wahn !!), then driving for 2 hours and I finally arrived safe in Caen in the evening (the 10 energy drinks I had in the car really helped keeping me awake).

There I hooked up with Aalto, Ratsi and Lego_man, who were

taking care of the visuals in the ”Klub” room of this big festival, on a massive installation they helped to design: the big room has litreally been created by building 3 walls made out of big square screens, to create a very geometrical semi closed space. Then 7 seven video projectors were projecting images on the all around, using a multiprojection setup (which means that each wall could have a different visual on it) and playing with the mapping technique, then they could also “map” visuals on the big squared screens and play with masks.

Photo report
Ok, you might find it quite difficult to picture, I guess the best explanation is a set of photos

Technical setup:
- Custom screens and installation.
- 6 x 8 000 lumens video projectors + 1 x 12 000 lumens.
- hundreds of meters of vga and RGB cables.
- 8×8 VGA Matrix switcher, signal amplifiers
- 4 laptop computers (all Apple, running on Modul8) with multi output support.
- 7 different video signals (with a dualhead and a triplehead 2 Go)
- Loads of different Midi controlers.

The result was a very impressive and immersive setup, the crowd was literaly surrounded by amazingly well produced visuals (ratsi, Aalto and Lego_man all have very unique visuals, but with some commons points in style and subjects, and their content blends really well together) and this setup created a very cutting edge experience for the audience.
To be honest the audio lineup in this room was good, but didn’t sound “that” special, and it’s funny to realize that sometimes the visual element is starting taking over the music side, and I’m convinced that many people that will come back for the visual lineup, and because of the great visual experience they had, which left much more souvenirs than the usual silhouette of a dj pushing records.

Video report
Here’s a short video (edited by Lego_man) which might talk by itself :

It’s a bit of a shame that the Lighting was a bit random and didn’t really add anything, organisers might have better switch that off rather than having multicolored oldschool and disco patterns overlaying the projections sometimes, but anywayyyyy….

It was great to hookup with Pikilipita (which actually is from Caen, before he left to London to hack gameboys), grominet and other nice friendly people.

Radio interview
Aalto and Lego_man have been interviewed on a local radio show (at 4AM during the festival), and I was around to show some support while ratsi was busy playing live.
If you don’t fluently understand french, here’s a good opportunity to practice..

Download the podcast. (french only)

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:

Après des préparatif par email un peu compliqués, tout fini par s’arranger à quelques jours du festival: Départ de Paris à 4h du mat le lendemain de noël, avec Aalto [studiovj], compagnon de ce séjour Teuton
Nous arrivons donc une journée avant le début du festival, ce qui permet de repérer les lieux: Avit se déroule en plein centre, à la fois au M12 (gallerie / bar orientée visuels, tenue par Visomat), et au Bcc, un immense batîment qui acceuille en même temps la conférence 23C3, un évênement dédié aux hacking et aux geeks Tout ça contribue à une ambiance bien particulière, avec des routeurs Wifi scotchés au murs, des nerds assis dans les couloirs, des sculptures de LEDs programmables..

La programmation VJing était assez interessante, avec des Vjs de nombreuses nationalités, des démos, workshops, présentations de logiciel.. même si on retrouvait beaucoup de VJing “classique” (multi-layers et effets), mais de très belles rencontres et de bon moments (notamment la Jam au club couch, que j’ai ratée, et l’after party au C-Base).

Parmi les highlights de ce festival, beaucoup de choses vraiment bien au M12:
- Tagtool: Un système de dessin en temps réel, avec une palette graphique et des faders pour controler différents paramètres, comme la couleur, transparence, ou le mouvement des éléments dessinés.. Un côté “live” et spontanné vraiment interessant.
- Aalto vjset: Encore un très bon mix, avec 100% de production et un style bien personnel, savant mélange d’Aftereffects, de dessin et de 3D vectoriel, le tout avec un choix de couleur et d’ambiance original. Macbook + UC33 et padKontrol. Des extraits de son travail sont disponibles ici.
- Multitouch screen: Démonstration d’un écran tactile réactif à plusieurs doigts simultanément. Un procédé finalement realtivement simple (Projecteur / Plexi, LEDs + caméra infrarouge) mais qui est promis à un bel avenir dans le dévelopement des prochaines générations d’interfaces utilisateurs, et dans le domaine de l’art sans aucun doute (comme le projet reacTable).
- Telematique: Vjing abstrait, travail sur la lumière et les images. Sven Gareis utilise une install de néons, controllés en DMX, et des projections sur cette install, avec des effets de feedbacks vidéo qui génèrent de l’écho visuel, et des visuels très minimaux et contrastés, avec un beau travail plastique.
- Vixid: Présentation d’un nouveau mixer vidéo 16 entrées, développé en collaboration avec des Vjs: Une interface de qualité, intuitive, un hardware fiable et puissant, pas trop d’effets classiques “cheaps”.. en tout cas un produit qui envoie directement la V4 à la poubelle ! Xray caméraman.
Seul point négatif, des entrées / sorties du siècle dernier: composite (le pire standard de qualité existant, datant de 1953) et svidéo, mais pas encore de DVI, SVGA, HDMI ou autres standards actuels.
- Formation au Vjing: présentation par Pavel Mrkaus d’une nouvelle filière universitaire axée sur les visuels en temps réels.
- Spark: Set A/V de Toby (avit uk) avec apparement un beau travail sur le côté narratif des images (je n’ai malheureusement aperçu que quelques images en préparant mon set).

Pour ma part, je devait jouer au Bcc (projections rythmiques en extérieur) mais malgrès les préparatifs réussis, des soucis de dernière minute ont changé les plans, et j’ai donc fait une mini presta audio-visuelle au M12, pour la clotûre du festival. Petit extrait vidéo de mon set:

Plus de photos sur flickr, et report détaillé sur le blog de Xray et le site du festival.
Version anglaise de ce post disponible ici, un petit post sur le Blog de vjspark, et si vous lisez l’hébreux, voici un article de Presse fort interessant.

Un grand merci à Aalto, sans qui je n’aurais sans doute pas bougé, Fred et Kiritan de visual Berlin, organisateurs du festival, à Torsten et Michal (visomat / M12), ainsi qu’aux poulpes d’ “artificial eye” pour la photo de titre.