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/

Related posts:
- 3DESTRUCT
- 3DESTRUCT IN RUSSIA WITH ONEDOTZERO

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:

Legoman (Yannick Jacquet)
Graphic designer, VJ, motion designer
Also, Legoman just joined the Core of AntiVJ.

Shirü (Jérémie Peeters)
Graphic designer, print silkscreener, VJ

Thomas Vaquié
Musician, sound designer, sound engineer

3Destruct is an immersive installation, a large semi transparent cube that generates light an sound, and as the visitor walks through, he loses his landmarks in this non-linear universe that destroys any spacial coherence.

This project has been presented in Belgium (Louvain), Switzerland (Geneva) and Netherlands (Eindhoven) as an installation, and will be presented soon with a live performance.

AntiVJ – 3Destruct from antivj