Study for a secret door
New approach
Our proposed new approach for the house, as seen from the street
As part of a larger remodelling and refurbishment of a family house in Vinterbro, we have put a particular focus on redesigning the house approach from the street, linking a new accessible and welcoming entrance to the home with a new woodworking workshop and garage.
The existing approach, as seen from the street
Portfolio project
Yellow Brick Road #6 installation
Continuing our collaboration with artist Morgan Dimnet, of French art collective QuboGas, we developed an interactive installation that explored the relationship between of visual artwork and electronic sound composition.
The Yellow Brick Road #6 installation/workshop at the Frigo (Albi, France)
The project was inspired by the Mélisson, an educational modular sound synthesizer developed in the 1980s at the GMEA — Centre National de Création Musicale Albi-Tarn (France).
Initially created to introduce children to the fascinating world of sound synthesis through experimentation and collaboration, these playful instruments were also used by experienced electronic musicians to create complex soundscapes and compositions.
Morgan Dimnet wanted to place the Mélisson at the centre of his new installation/workshop, inviting pupils of local primary schools to use its intuitive physical interface as a composition tools for not only sound, but also for visual art.
Exploring infinite variations of sounds and visual compositions, the visitors are then invited to create a physical vinyl disc cover for their own musical creation.
Collaborative sound creation with the Mélisson modules (© GMEA)
As the knobs of the Mélisson modules are tweaked to create unique sounds and effects, this soundscape is translated into similarly unique composition of shapes and colours, projected onto the workshop’s wall — ready to be reproduced by the visitors on mini stamping workshops designed by the artist for the exhibition.
We developed for this installation a hardware interface that could “listen” to the Mélisson synthesizers, and a custom computer program that translated the sound creations into unique visual artwork, following the artist’s visual language and aesthetics.
The project took place in 2022 with several primary schools in Albi, and concluded by a public exhibition at the collaborative cultural centre Le Frigo.
Project credits:
Visuals and furniture design: Morgan Dimnet
Hardware interface and electronics: 2hD Architecture Workshop, with Jean-Jacques Devulder
Programming (Processing): 2hD Architecture Workshop
Music composition (vinyl edition): Roland Ossart
Samba in the stair
Following our complete remodel and extension of their cabins in Hvitsten, overlooking the Oslo Fjord, our clients asked us to also fit an extra living space in one of the little annex buildings on the site.
The tiny cabin that we designed accommodates a play space for the children during daytime, a small workstation, sleeping space for two adults and two children, as well as a small terrace for summer breakfast overlooking the fjord. To reach the private sleeping space tucked up over the small living-room, we custom-designed a compact alternating tread stair, called sambatrapp (“samba stair”) in Norwegian, which also doubled as a bookshelves for the desk underneath.
We love working on self-build projects and custom-made furniture, so we were thrilled when our client announced that he wanted to build the stair himself. As with our custom-made screen wall in the main cabin, we developed in collaboration with him alternative designs for the stairs, adjusting the design to joinery techniques he mastered, to produce a full cut-and-assembly manual to build the stairs.
Visualisation for a residential complex
Visualisation for a care centre
A roof top terrace in central Oslo
Having secured planning permission for our roof terrace project in central Oslo, we are now finalising the detailed design, with construction of the staircase extension and roof landscape due to start on site this spring. Above is a quick visualisation we prepared for our clients’ presentation to the residents of the housing cooperative — based on the 3D model that will also be used to communicate all the technical documentations for the construction phase.
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Visualisations for the Mølla Hotel, Lillehammer
Design by Besseggen Arkitekter.
Fåvang visualisation
Part of a series of vsualisations for a modular housing development by Besseggen Arkitekter, in Fåvang, Norway.
Illustrations for a new court house
Approaching the new courthouse in Eidsvoll (design by Besseggen Arkitekter)
Continuing our collaboration with Besseggen Arkitekter, we have produced a series of illustrations to present a new court house project to the municipality of Eidsvoll, Norway.
This ambitious project, designed by Besseggen, aims at gathering on the same site the different courthouses of the region as well as a new police station, cradling the site of the old train station on the bank of the Vorma river.
Thanks to an efficient design workflow developed by Besseggen, we were able to produce inspiring illustrations based on their BIM model at an early stage of the design process.
These images were used to present the project to the local community and gather political support, before the Norwegian Court Administration takes a decision later on this year on the future location of the new regional courthouse.
Design concept for a fire station
Concept design visualisation of our future fire station in Såner, Norway, with its public facing core building and connected modular fire engine halls at the back.
I have been collaborating this last week with Besseggen Arkitekter (with whom we are sharing our new office in Oslo), developing a design strategy for a new fire station in Vestby, Norway.
The competition brief called for an easily extendable building, with a strong focus on personnel safety. I have prepared this sketch concept view, together with diagrams explaining our design approach to address these points. Using a construction strategy based on modular plug-in elements with identical folded structure roofs, each module can be easily connected to the station as it expands in the future, supplementing both additional capabilities and associated staff accommodation to the facilities.
The design strategy diagrams we prepared for the competition
Portfolio project
Symétriades: visualising contemporary music
View of our live projection mapped onto the performance stage
Symétriades/Extension is a visual experience that we created for an eponymous contemporary music piece for solo double bass and musical artificial intelligence.
Commissioned by Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France, this art performance was presented at a contemporary music festival in October 2018.
In this project, art director Alain Fleischer and music composer Yann Robin wanted to express the idea of an abstract immolation of the soloist through the performance of this powerful musical piece, “plunging the audience into an immersive experience of engulfment” and “a fusion between the worlds of the seen and the heard.”
We developed with the artists a scenography and live video projections generated in real-time by the sounds and movements of the musician on stage, merging the expressionist visual universe of Alain Fleischer with poetic elements from Stanislaw Lem’s book Solaris.
“This is what I call an immersive experience! It was incredible to witness my own avatars being destroyed in real time, as I performed the piece.
2hD’s work, under the artistic benevolence of Alain Fleischer, gave an exponential dimension to Yann Robin’s composition, merging the visual and musical architectures into one.”
Extract from Yann Robin’s musical score, codifying the complex movements of the soloist on the double bass (image © Yann Robin)
Symétriades as a musical piece
Composed in 2013 by Yann Robin, Symétriades is the second opus of three abstract compositions, all titled after the incomprehensible architectural formations described in Lem’s fictitious discipline of solaristics.
Inspired by and written for Nicolas Crosse’s double-bass powerful playing technique, the composition of the musical piece also includes an artificial intelligence that reprocesses in real-time the soloist’s live performance. This electronic system, developed at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), distorts, filters and reconfigures the music into a network of 8 loudspeakers and 4 sub-woofers that spatialise the sounds around the audience.
The visual experience
The artists wanted to visually express the contained ferocity of the music, using the metaphor of the bass as an instrument of self destruction.
Echoing some of the themes from Lem’s enigmatic book, we constructed the visual narrative of the performance as a succession of digital incarnations of the bass player.
Overlaid onto his physical presence on stage as video projections, each of these “doppelgänger” gets corrupted and eventually destroyed under the assaults of the sounds and movements of the musician on stage. Progressively turning into an abstracted version of his image, it finally recomposes itself into a purely abstract visual representation of the music.
To achieve this, our approach mixed real-time filming, 3D motion analysis of the musician on stage and sound analysis. We coded a custom computer program that could dynamically create and composite layers of animations over the image of the musician being projected onto the stage and coordinate them with the electronic sound processing.
The dynamic nature of our system allowed the video projections to adjust to the improvisations of the musician during the performance — something that the musical score specifically encourages during certain parts of the piece!
Double-bass solist Nicolas Crosse during rehearsals, seen through the shifting moiré of the translucent projection screens of our scenography.
The scenography
In parallel to the visual effects, we also designed a stage scenography for the performance.
From an early stage, we wanted to keep the powerful delivery of the soloist at the centre of the visual experience. Its perception by the audience should therefore be altered not only by the means of digital video projections, but also through the physical, direct medium of the scenography.
Playing with the perception of depth, we shrouded the stage with multiple layers of finely meshed black fabrics. These translucent surfaces create the screen for the video projections superimposed onto the stage and blur the projection into an elusive volumetric presence.
Positioned between the audience and the stage, they further distort the direct sight of the bass player through shifting patterns of moiré, adding to the expressionist makeup and costume of the performer, and echoing the liquid nature of the book’s protoplasmic being. Modulating the contrast between stage lighting and video projections, we could also shift the audience’s focus between the performer on stage and his abstract projected doubles.
The creative process
As we developed and refined the effects over the course of the production phase, we produced a series of video prototypes that precisely simulated the effects, based on high-definition videos and 3D captures taken during the first rehearsal. This allowed the involved artists to visualise the performance in real conditions at each design iteration, keeping the artistic discussion open and adjustments to the system simple.
We also took care of sorting out the technical solutions for the performance, selecting adequate equipment and producing detailed 3D models of the scenography and technical workflows, so that its feasibility could be checked with the technical team as the project developed.
Credits for the project
Art direction: Alain Fleischer
Music composer: Yann Robin
Double bass soloist: Nicolas Crosse
Electronic sound treatment: Robin Meier
Scenography & live video projection system: 2hD
Production manager: Bertrand Scalabre
Stage manager: Alexis Noël
Sound setup: Geoffrey Durcak
Production: Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in co-production with L’Ensemble Multilaterale
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The tools we used for the Symétriades performance
Technical diagram of the performance setup
Capitalising on our experience in the Ooo-Ya-Tsuproject, we developed for the Symétriades/Extension performance a custom program in Processing, which managed the sound, video and motion captures and generated the projected visualisation in real-time.
Some open source libraries were also used to interface together the different components of the system: Open Kinect for Processing (for real-time video and 3D analysis on stage), Minim (for real-time sound analysis) and oscP5 (for OSC network communication).
The different computers in the performance were communicating via OSC, using the excellent OSCulator (controlling the multi-track audio playback) and TouchOSC, for which we developed a custom graphical interface to tune the parameters of the Processing program in real-time.
Symétriades live performances this weekend!
I am at the Studio National des Arts Contemporains (a.k.a. Le Fresnoy) for the final rehearsals of the Symétriades art performance, for which we developed the scenography and live video projections.
Double bass player Nicolas Crosse will be interpreting Yann Robin’s Symétriades piece for solo double bass and electronics, spatialised over a complex electronic post-processing system and overlaid with the live video projections we have created with visual artist Alain Fleischer.
The performance will be shown as part of a contemporary music festival within Panorama 20, the yearly exhibition showcasing the art projects developed at the Studio over the last year.
There will be four public presentations of the performance over the weekend:
Friday 5 October 2018 at 20:00 and 22:15
Sunday 7 October 2018 at 15:00 and 17:00
Come and join us for a mighty musical and visual experience!
First rehearsals for the Symétriades art performance
Prototype of live visual effects, projected over double-bass player Nicolas Crosse, through the black open weave screens
I was at the National Studio for Contemporary Arts this week, for two days of rehearsals for the Symétriades art performance.
It was the first opportunity to test in real conditions the scenography and visual effects for the video projections that I had been developing for the performance in the past few months, collaborating with lead artist Alain Fleischer, music composer Yann Robin and double-bass player Nicolas Crosse.
Based on the idea of the soloist immolating himself through the performance of Yann Robin's piece for solo double-bass and electronics, our scenography is playing on the layering of open weave fabrics that are shrouding the musician in shifting patterns of moiré and acting as translucent screen surfaces for real-time video projections.
We will be developing further the motion capture techniques and visuals over the summer, until the first public performances of Symétriades on 5th and 7th of October 2018, at Le Fresnoy.
