He just been commissioned by the New York Times to produce one creation for their “T” Logo series. The result is a full page in the paper version of the NYT style magazine, with 2 millions copies edited worldwide.

Here’s the copy we received this morning !

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.

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: