AntiVJ (AntinVJ.com) is a visual ‘label’ – a curious use of a term that even within music highlights the degree to which the economics of media have changed (no longer the inscription of a producer on its product but rather a loose affinity of interests). AntiVJ rescues the aesthetic and social sense of the term ‘label’ – a loose collective of artists gathered under the banner of a particular stylistic project, neither indicating or excluding the possibility of collaboration or consensus, more continuous and with greater ‘gravity’ than a curated project and more dynamic, fluid and a-social than a collective – and perhaps also with an eye on the development of a commercial/professional umbrella. AntiVJ represents a group of European artists whose work focusses on the ‘use projected light and its influence on our perception’ (AntiVJ.com). The work represented by the AntiVJ label has elements that recall the James Turrell’s manipulation of the experience of an object or space via an active modulation of the resonance – the light and the sound – realised between body and object. The intersecession of AntiVJ is decidedly and determinedly more active/aggressive/deconstructive, coming as it does out of the club and street art, than any of Turrell’s abstract minimalism but both affect an intense refiguring of the bodies position within and relation to an object.
Much of AntiVJ’s work is positioned against the status quo of club based VJing – in that the works tend to explore a unified theme, question, or project that is driven by the context in which it is performed or presented – one of AntiVS’s artists, Olivier Ratsi describes one of his modes of production as ‘live painting’ and to a certain degree this term describes the type of work AntiVJ do in a more general sense as well – dynamic time based projections that transfigure the site of their projection. AntiVJ consists of artists Simon Geilfus, Yannick Jacquet, Joanie Lemercier, and Olivier Ratsi, Romain Tardy with music by Thomas Vaquie.
The work of AntiVJ has mostly involved large scale intricately mapped projections onto the surface of the built environment. Some of the work extends to or from the club environment but it real power lies in both extrapolating, deconstructing, and playing with the perception of the surface and volume of architecture via the play of projected light (Desherence, Songdo). More recent work has included large scale stereoscopic work with the electro outfit Principles of Geometry – a 50 minute exploration of a starry 3D space and work with Mexican composer and producer Murcof – confounding projections that seem to hang and move through mid space at will.
AntiVJ’s work displays a unique aesthetic and a previously unseen degree of precision in terms of projection onto large scale, multi-faced/multidimensional, objects. The mapping is apparently achieved via software developed in house that AntiVJ intend to eventually release publicly.