It’s not surprising to see Olivier Ratsi throwing himself into a project revolving around the realms of architecture, photography, and digital collage. The French art and design collective he co-founded, AntiVJ, brands itself as a “visual label” specializing in audiovisual projections, 3D mapping, and illuminated installations. They exhibit their projects in a variety of ways, especially in urban environments. AntiVJ’s efforts play with our perceptions of space while distorting, deforming, and masking their remarkable backdrops, using an objective view to recreate a subjective reality.Now Ratsi is launching a new endeavor on his own. WYSI*not*WYG, an acronym for “What You See Is Not What You Get,” is a collection of “Anarchitectures.” The term refers to photographic creations made from collages of familiar urban image samples. Ratsi makes use of a cityscape by fragmenting it, breaking it up, and piecing it back together into a physically impossible landscape.
Truncated perspectives, gravity-defying objects, and disappearing buildings compel us to question our relationship with images already familiar to us. By changing well-known zones, like public gardens and residential neighborhoods, Ratsi forces us to revisit what we know about our spaces. As he explains, “everything began once I realized that our perception of objective reality was conditioned from what we have learnt and from the life experience we have garnered from our earliest years.” His approach consists of de-conditioning us in order to create “another point of view” or “a break in the tangible reality of the information.” The information isn’t entirely encrypted, though; Ratsi’s final product still allows access to these places, as the viewers can reconstruct the locations based on their own experiences and interpretations.Photos courtesy of Olivier Ratsi.[Via TrendsNow.net]
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