AntiVJ

AntiVJ Lab: Live painting and mapping

crustea — 2008-06-11T18:48:40+02:00

Since the launch of the label, everything is going even faster than before, and we have loads of new projects, ideas and bookings coming up..

I've been exploring new fields recently:

- Dome projection, in Bristol planetarium, with the mexican producer Murcof, and the 360° projection format is very immersive, even more than I expected, so I think I'll carry on with this technique.
- Stereoscopic projection, with polarised filters and silverscreen (same technology as Imax3D), to make visuals appears in 3 Dimensions to the audience. This is also a fascinating technique, and we are investing a lot in this way, and we'll do more dates soon for the stereoscopic tour, with french band "Principles of Geometry".
- More experiments, with lights, DMX and perception.

I also did an interesting experiment the other day, I miss a lot painting, as I used to do draw a lot and do graffiti / stencils before, but I've been too busy with projectors recently, and a commission for an exhibition in Bristol brought me back into acrylic paint..
I've been asked to do a short live performance for the closing of an Art exhibition, and I wanted to use the mapping technique live painting and perspective, so I quickly put together some visuals inspired by a sketch from the light Artist James Turrell.

AntiVJ Lab - Live painting & mapping from crustea on Vimeo.

Thanks to Cristina for filming the performance.

New AntiVJ studio

crustea — 2008-05-05T18:13:39+02:00

AntiVJ just moved to a new studio in Central Bristol !

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.

AntiVJ is a visual label

crustea — 2008-04-16T12:49:24+02:00

Hi there !

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

Off to Austria

crustea — 2007-12-30T20:47:00+02:00

For the last week of the year, I'm having a well deserved few days of holidays, just between Switzerland and Austria, enjoying snowboard (the weather and snow is perfect this week).

The blog will be back in a couple of days with fresh new stuff:
- Lightup Bristol report: video of my set, a 1600 m2 mapping projection.
- Cuisine 12: report of our latest clubnight, with visuals from Digital slaves.
- Inode: a new A/V project, with origamis and a 3D projection in a 4 meters cube.
- AntiVJ: launch a our new visual label.
- An invisible touchscreen interface I'm working on, built with vvvv.

Thanks a lot for all your comments and emails, it's nice to see that many people interested in live visuals.. The blog gets more and more visitors each month since I did the first post in 2006:

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160 000 hits
50 000 unique visitors
20 000 hits / month
videos: 100 000 views
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Here are a few other links if you are interested:
Flickr - Youtube - Myspace crustea - Myspace AntiVJ - AntiVJ website

I'm going away from the computer now, the snow looks amazing outside :)

Lightup Bristol

crustea — 2007-12-13T16:39:44+02:00

A new very exciting project ! Some Bristolian creative agencies are teaming up to produce and project moving images on the council house building during the week before christmas.

2006
The Lightup Bristol project started last year, with some still images projections designed by Aardman Animations, Play Nicely, Watershed, and the organisers were interested in having me on board after seeing my mapping technique on Youtube (mapping on my neighbours house).

A few pictures from last year event:

So we are in charge of the technical management, sourcing the playback hardware / software and I'll also produce an Audio Visual piece involving multiprojection mapping.

Tech specs:
Here are a few few technical details, the biggest mapping I've ever done so far.
- 6 * 20 000 lumens projectors, to project on the 160m x 10m facade.
- We'll use high res visuals: 1024x768 on each projector, so the output image is 6144x768.
- To stream such High res format, we'll have 2 "killer" media servers, to run very large video files.
- We'll use the VJ software Arkaos 3.6 to control the video, with multi output and Midi support, we'll be able to synchronize the visuals together and stream Gigabytes of video very smoothly.
- VVVV will be used to sequence and root midi MIDI signals between computers.

Schedule:
If you are local, and interested to see how the mapping works, you're more than welcome on College green this Sunday from 6pm.
The projections will run everynight, from Monday 17th to Friday 21st, 6.30pm til 10. I will do the live A/V performance at 9.45 every evening, so don't hesitate to come along.
This event is free.

PDF Flyer

There will be an afterparty at the end of the week, Cuisine, the 21st of december at Timbuk2.

Nordik Impact festival - report

crustea — 2007-12-12T05:31:47+02:00

Straight after Cuisine and an hour of sleep, I flew to France for an exiting event: three of my friends, which happen to be my favorites Vjs as well, were working on a big visual installation for a festival in North West of France: Nordik impact.

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.
- 8x8 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)

Cuisine 11 - photo report

crustea — 2007-12-11T11:00:05+02:00

Here are some pictures from our great resident photographer Alex Turner at Cuisine 11 in November, which gives a pretty good idea about how it was !

Here are a couple more from Sigma6's website:

Thanks again to Sigma6 who came down from Geneva to do the visuals, and Zac our mini model for the juicy Flyer.

See you this month, with the infamous RCTC from Nantes !

Cuisine 11 - Sigma6

crustea — 2007-12-10T09:00:51+02:00

For this 11th edition of our Cuisine clubnight, we had the brilliant VJ duo "Sigma6" from Geneva. I've met Florian and Eric at the Mapping festival last summer, and then at Tweakfest in Zurich, where we did a workshop and a live set, and we had a chance to share idea and realize we had commons interests in design, visuals installations etc...

So they came to Bristol to perform at our A/V clubnight "Cuisine", and played together for a couple of hour on a semi transparent screens installation over the crowd (designed by another brilliant Swiss VJ: Lego_man).

They are great producers and have a very special taste for urban slices and industrial architecture visuals, playing efficiently with light, depth and immersive visuals.

Here's one of my favorites Sigma6's production, and a live performance:

Creative Space by Florian - Sigma6

Sigma6 Live - Le Zoo, Geneva

More videos on Sigma6's website, youtube and myspace.

Cuisine 11 - photoshoot

crustea — 2007-12-08T22:26:35+02:00

Another great Cuisine night.. It started well a month before with the flyer photoshoot.

No hologram or fancy projections this time, Just a kid and loads of fresh tomatoes. We liked the suspension effect of the milk on the previous flyer, and we wanted to have that kind of frozen movement, so we trowed loads of red tomatoes to Zac, the club manager's son.

We had to take loads of pictures to get the perfect one (and avoid any photoshoping), and the final photography happened to be one a the first we took, before Zac got very messy and covered with exploded vegetables, as you can see on Alex Turner's blog.

Thanks Zac for enduring this very juicy hour.

Free unlimited calls on mobile

crustea — 2007-12-03T12:19:39+02:00

Eventually, the next revolution in communication is happening..

While internet connection prices kept going down since it's availability to public market (1994: charge per minute, then packages with X hours of communication, and monthly contracts with unlimited access when xDSL / cable arrived in 2000) in comparison, mobile phones communication prices didn't change much since it massively entered the market in 1996..

Step by step, some calls from mobiles slowly become cheaper or free (calls to landlines, or same network mobiles) but international calls are still incredibly expensive, and even just receiving a call when you travel abroad could be ridiculously expensive.

Special mention to the english phone provider 02 who raped me of hundreds of pounds / month for a couple of hours roaming or just receiving calls and texts. So after this very bad experience (stay away from 02 thieves !) I had to find a cheaper option to give and receive call in England and while touring abroad, and options like check my emails etc.. would be a nice bonus.

The skypephone
Following the Iphone release, all the phone providers have to think about competitive and attractive offers to be not left behind by Apple, and turn up with new products and packages.
This is what the english company 3 (three) comes up with: the Skypephone.

It looks like a regular phone (it does the same really: call and receive calls / texts / mms anywhere, on pay as you go or monthly contract from £12) but..

.. it has a built in skype software, so you can do voice calls over IP and chat with one of the 250 millions skype users around the world, wherever you are in UK (you just need to get the phone network signal, and 3 has a good coverage) and talk forever without any extra charge ! It's also free when you travel to Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Australia and Hong Kong, and hopefully even more countries soon.
It also means that you'll always be connected to skype, so people can skype you at anytime, while you are in the park or at a gig, for free.
As a bonus you also get unlimited msn, ebay, facebook and other popular websites access with no data charge, and the phone has a nice 2.0Mpixels camera, mp3 player etc..

The bad points:
Well, it's not perfect yet, as it's quite a new thing, there are a couple of negative things:
- No skype in / skype out: you can't use these great options to give even cheaper calls to international numbers via voIP.
- No skype video conference yet (I can't wait to get the next firware update, with hopefully free video conference option using the built in camera).
- Usually the signal is fine and good quality, but you can expect a few cuts and voice robots sometimes. Not ideal when you talk to a client, but pretty funny anyway. ;)
- You only get the free skype option when you're in one of these countries which have 3's sisters networks.

So for the time being, I have another phone for the other countries, and I skype (in/out) over Wifi network for free as well, with the good old Belkin phone.

Hope you get as excited as I am by this new revolution !

Edit: This is not why I wrote this post, but I just noticed that 3 offers a voucher to new recommended customers.