Continuing our MUTEK interview series, we talk to AntiVJ artist Joanie Lemercier and producer Nicolas Boritch about their approach to mind-bending projected music visuals, their evolution from nightclub VJing to producing large-scale artistic collaborations, and their approach to working as a “visual label.”
Since 2005, AntiVJ has had a resounding influence on visuals in dance clubs, live music performance, and installations. Though they pioneered and perfected the usage of projection mapping – wherein carefully-aligned digital projections create illusions on unconventional surfaces – AntiVJ pledges allegiance to no technique, only a focus “on the use of projected light and its influence on our perception.”
AntiVJ’s 2008 collaboration at Nuit Blanche Brussels introduced the potential of projection mapping to a broad audience.
They’ve also maintained a low public profile, so while their colleague Simon Geilfus prepared for his performance with Mexican ambient electronic musician Murcof at MUTEK 2011, we were fortunate to meet with Lemercier and Boritch to talk about AntiVJ’s motivations, structure, and opinions. Both had just arrived from France, having survived three consecutive sleepless nights’ preparing their next major installation.
Lemercier, a graphic designer, started VJing in Bristol, England in 2005 using personal photography. Thanks to Bristol’s vibrant club scene, he was soon VJing at danceclubs weekly. With Boritch, he organized a monthly event, Cuisine, inviting artists from around Europe. Before long, the two found likeminded talents with ambitions to provide visuals that had a deeper impact than static projections on rectangular screens.
3Destruct, an immersive installation AntiVJ produced for Biennale d’Art contemporain in Louvain, Belgium in 2007.
By 2007, the yet-to-be-formed AntiVJ crew had developed a digital graffiti wall working with new members Romain Tardy (VJ Aalto), Yannick Jacquet (Lego_man), and Olivier Ratsi (emovie). Jacquet experimented with projecting on transparent materials while Lemercier explored projection mapping. Meanwhile, Lemercier focused his Cuisine recruitment on artists with a strong, identifiable aesthetic such as Pikilipita, a French video artist who hacks gaming devices and cellphones to create visuals, and Sanch, a groundbreaking generative artist with a background in sculpture.
That same year, AntiVJ artists collaborated on a large installation at Nördik Impakt, an annual music festival in Caen, France. AntiVJ soon became an organization facilitating its artists’ collaboration, promotion, funding, and production.
Today, AntiVJ works as a visual analogue to a music label. “We’re really inspired by music labels,” says Lemercier, “it’s a structure to produce and promote some projects or some artists which all have some things in common, but each artist has his own style.”
Boritch, a former music industry professional, agrees. “I grew up with Warp, and Skam, and all those labels, with a really really strong… identity, aesthetics, attitude as well and a vision, a direction.”
The idea of a collective, in contrast, doesn’t fit AntiVJ well. “We would really not like to be a collective… having to be a set number of people always working together and having a really closed sort of structure. I think the visual label makes more sense on different levels.”
Despite the loose approach, It didn’t come automatically. “I think it took us
a while to find our way to work,” says Lemercier, ”we all do solo projects,
sometimes collaboration with one person or two persons.”
AntiVJ’s set developed for Nuits Sonores, a festival hosted in Lyon, France, in 2009.
AntiVJ’s name may seem intentionally ironic, reactionary, or even provocative. “We all come from this VJing world,” says Lemercier, “We’ve all done 8-hour VJ sets to a drum ‘n bass – or techno, or breaks, or whatever – we’d just turn up with our laptop, live, we’d have to improvise and you have to bring your own cables, your ladder, and it’s quite demanding, but we definitely come from this, we all have this background.
“I’m quite proud that I’ve done a couple of hundred gigs just playing live alongside the DJ, and you have to improvise, be good at syncing stuff, try to get good at technical mixing as well. I find it really nice, but at some point we just started doing something different. What I wanted to do was get away from the rectangular screen, so by projecting onto objects, buildings, and that kind of thing.
“People were asking, ‘What’s your job? What are you doing?’ and if we’d answer VJ, or VJing, people would think about something completely different. They would think about multicolour layers and whatever I said before, this kind of old-school video effects that are in pretty much every VJing software. It was more a bit of a joke, this AntiVJ thing.”
“It’s a bit of both,” says Boritch. “It’s a statement because it does mean something that we think and at the same time it’s just a clin d’oeil [an inside joke]… it’s a reference to the fact that all four artists from the beginning are VJs.”
AntiVJ’s focus now is to be seen as an umbrella for its artists, rather than a single entity. “The first couple of years we used this name AntiVJ without putting the artist in front,” admits Lemercier. However, that has changed in the last year. “We’re trying to be like a real label and push the artists as individuals and promote them when one project is an artist project or if one artist is the creative director for one project, we’ll push his name.”
With projection mapping hitting the mainstream – just this week, Wrigleys 5 Gum picked up an FWA award for its crowd-sourced projection mapping advertising campaign – a challenge AntiVJ faces is how to continue making an impact on audiences when their techniques have been appropriated at ever-increasing rates.
“It seems that the advertising industry is taking over video mapping,” says Lemercier, ”I’m trying to imagine what it will be like in a couple of years’ time if companies start putting video projectors in the streets to have, like, permanent 3D advertising using architecture just to sell stuff.”
Commercial work, by the way, has little appeal to AntiVJ. “We get a million emails asking us to do stage design for a beer company or to do some projection for a big brand,” continues Lemercier, ”that’s really not what we’re really interested in from the very beginning… we’re more interested in live performance and installation and things.”
Though his stance is a little more open, Boritch agrees. “We’re not against the idea of making some money, doing one-offs. But at some point you have to make a choice,” he says. “It depends on whether you want to keep your time to carry on developing, carry on experimenting, and not having any – too much pressure, or only the pressure that you decide to take. But not any pressure from big projects and big brands.”
Lemercier keeps a watchful eye on trends and technologies. “I spend about two hours a day watching stuff and reading blogs. I spend loads of time doing research about Kinect, about MIDI controllers, about tracking.”
“You can watch about 10 YouTube pieces every day and I think maybe once a month there’s something quite nice or a visual that hasn’t been done before. But yeah, it’s rare and I wish there would be more new things more often. But we’ll see what’s gonna happen. I’m not sure.”
In the meantime, Boritch is hopeful. “As the equipment and the technique is getting more around and cheaper, hopefully there will be more opportunities for artists to experiment with it and they will bring more new stuff that you didn’t see coming.
“But for the mapping technique itself – and not just for buildings, but the mapping technique – it can be applied to any object and that’s really the core of the AntiVJ label from the beginning. When Joanie was experimenting with mapping around 2006, it was just the idea to turn any object into a display. I think there’s huge potential for decades, hopefully to create new stuff.”
A promotional video of AntiVJ’s collaboration with Murcof. A review of their show at MUTEK 2011 by CFC Media Lab IAEP Guest faculty, Greg J. Smith, can be found at Creative Applications.
Aylwin Lo is a Technical Coordinator at CFC Media Lab, providing technical and design support to many of the Media Lab’s activities. He is a graduate of Seneca College and the University of Waterloo.
Note: The day after posting this interview, Boritch emailed us to clarify a
few points. We revised this post on Wednesday, July 13 to more accurately reflect
AntiVJ’s relationships with its own artists as well as artists they have
collaborated with, and their views on organizational structure.