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

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

If you are interested in live visuals, you probably heard about Olivier’s work before, as the man is one of the most demanded VJs in Europe, and he performed in many festivals (Festival Optronica, Mapping, Nemo, Exit, Centre George Pompidou, etc) under his VJ name EMovie.  I presented his work a couple of times on this blog, in the Paysages electroniques 07 report, or after Nordik impact, at the time we were tracing the first lines of the Label project.

I discovered Olivier’s work a couple of years ago, and I’ve been instantly convinced by his visual style and his artistic statement. Unlike many VJs, all his content is created around a main theme, a research on the time and space dimensions, fragments and deconstruction, and you can find some very interesting meanings behind his pretty images.

Olivier applies his ‘time & space’ fragmentation technique on different subjects (simple shapes, urban and land scapes, and more abstract textures) and several mediums, such as photography (check his Anarchitecture series), graphic design (he worked with the cult Parisian ‘Rex club’ for many years), live visuals (multiprojection and unusual formats), and more recently he’s been exploring installation work..
ANARCHITECTURE

LIVE VISUALS – Demo 08

So we met several times with Olivier, and each time we realized that we were sharing the same interests and aim in our work (also with Yannick Jacquet and Romain Tardy): step away from the usual projections screens and formats, explore projections in 3D spaces and study visual perception, and the classical but fascinating ‘time/space’ subject.

This is what initiated the creation of AntiVJ as a label, which Olivier Ratsi is now part of.

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.