Nuits Sonores Countdown: Meet AntiVJ

We continue our panorama of the artists who will contribute to radically transform Nuits sonores with artworks and unique installations through our creative partnership with the electronic music festival. They’ll be taking over key cultural landmarks in Lyon, a French city famous for its peaceful lifestyle located between the Rhone and Saône rivers, its cheerful gastronomy, and Karim Benzema.

After introducing you to Trafik last week, we explore the moving world of AntiVJ, another one of our featured Nuits sonores artists. This prolific label has emerged as a new media powerhouse on the European and international front over the past few years, producing a number of large-scale projects that have quickly captured the attention of the arts, music and design communities. A quick scan of their lengthy and impressive list of recent productions is enough to eliminate any confusion—AntiVJ’s sophisticated productions are hardly the work of some solitary rebel teen from the suburbs who does clumsy manipulations of images on his laptop to illustrate similarly clumsy musical mixes. Behind their contrarian name lies a label of varied and multidisciplinary artists led by Joanie Lemercier and Nicolas Boritch, and as such the multi-faceted collective mixes architectural mapping, light installations, scenography and audacious digital sculptures. Since the creation of the label, they had the opportunity to collaborate with prestigious institutions and festivals, which gave them opportunity to project their mesmerizing digital visuals on museums, opera houses, art centers and other impressive facades.

The cross-pollination of artistic disciplines is the trademark of the label's members. For instance, we recently wrote about Olivier Ratsi's personal photographic series, which itself is an amalgam of the disciplines of photography, architecture and sculpture. His Anarchitectures, which challenge gravity and our perception cast a subjective and poetic glance on the French suburbs.

Much like Trafik, AntiVJ are the most recent addition to our roster of French Creators, and we’ll be releasing a mini-documentary profile giving you and insider’s look into their work and creative process in coming weeks.

TOUR DES CONVOYEURS

Tour des Convoyeurs; audiovisual installation; May 2009
Olivier Ratsi (mentioned above) also participated in the creation of this mapping project introduced by Joanie Lemercier. An audiovisual installation created for the Montreal Mutek Festival in spring 2009. A large-scale projection mapped on a post-industrial tower in the middle of the city's Vieux-Port (old port).

ANTIVJ AND NUITS SONORES

Stage Design; May 2009
Much like Trafik, it’s not AntiVJ's first time at Nuits sonores. For the 2009 edition, they completely reinvented the festival's stage design with a physical and digital device composed of a sculpture on the scene and a series of panoramic video projections.

SONGDO

Audiovisual performance; August 2009.
The same year a commission from Nabi's International Art Center in Seoul saw the group take hold of a building in Songdo, a futuristic city in South Korea. It is a titanic project of a futuristic city built out of nothing, on a sea headway, and of several square feet.

MURCOF + ANTIVJ

Murcof + AntiVJ is a 70 minute audiovisual performance projected on giant invisible screens. The label describe the collaboration as hypnotic visuals floating in the air, that react to the hypnotic electronica of the Mexican composer Murcof.

THE GRID

On June 1st, AntiVJ will unveil a new collaboration at Marché Gare for The Creators Project at Nuits sonores. We can already say that The Grid is an interactive project made of three “Architectones” that will be placed in different spaces of Marché Gare. These architectones will establish emotional links between the music, the spectators and the architectural history of a symbolic landmark of the festival. Built with modular steel elements and covered in architectonic textile, the architectural design is created by My Routine, a Lyon architects duo (Laurent Graber and Antoine Trollat) in charge of Nuits sonores stage design since 2005. The architectones are made thanks to an interactive software developed by Renato Saleri and the video mappings are created by AntiVJ.

Photos and videos courtesy of AntiVJ 2011.