Synopsis: A look at agency Champagne Valentine's place in the intersecting worlds of art and interactive.

"You've done it, Pollock. You've cracked it wide open."

So says the movie version of Lee Krasner (Jackson Pollock's wife played by Marcia Gay Harden) when she sees the epic splatterings of the master abstract expressionist.

To compare anyone in the digital age to Pollock is almost obscenely premature, and in some circles, outright blasphemy, but the first time you see the work of Champagne Valentine—the Amsterdam based digital art house/agency founded by Anita Fontaine and Geoff Lillemon—it creates a reaction reserved for the sight of new ground.

There is style at play in their work that merges the unique visual perspectives of Lillemon (see oculart.com) and Fontaine (see anitafontaine.com) into a dominant visual language that exceeds a signature, and borders on a medium.

It’s experiential.

Sexy. Pixelated. Otherworldly.

A true marriage of love and technology.

And it’s beginning to crack open.

In what is hopefully becoming a trend, Champagne Valentine seems able to exist as a place that is “true to beauty and art”, with the commercial world bending, at least in part, to meet them.

“We are trying to create new mythologies and new visual and interactive experiences for the world, to give it something beautiful to engage with,” says Fontaine. “I think we always start there and combine these perspectives with an original concept as much as possible.”

With more than a decade of experience, creative directors Fontaine and Lillemon are no strangers to the gutter-like workings of the agency world, but their distinct shop has thus far managed to avoid the cookie cutter.

Their company website (champagnevalentine.com), for example, feels like a time warped interactive television with navigation akin to sequential experimentation (hit the skull to get the menu), placing them clearly outside the ‘best practices’ world of the interactive industry.

That didn't seem to bother Placebo (placeboworld.co.uk), whose interactive music video ‘The Never-Ending Why’ was created by Champagne Valentine, with the help of Amsterdam programmers ‘Random’ (random.nu). It’s a strange, meandering, monster-filled trip where the viewer controls the experience.

“We were inspired by the idea of the 'Never Ending Why' and decided to represent that thought with these mythological never ending why monsters who shape shift and control the world around them,” explains Fontaine. “We introduced a fairytale/videogame side-scroller type narrative starring a silhouetted couple who find it impossible to escape the monster's grasp, just like it's impossible to escape time.”

(Note: The embedded version you see here is a recording of the interactivity. For the real 'interactive' experience click here.)

“We wanted the interactivity to feel almost effortless … with it changing from scene to scene, constantly surprising the user. Like one minute they are controlling the way the bird monster is flying and the next minute they are generating beautiful seaweed patterns with their mouse.”

This sort of pixel bending represents what might only be the beginning, as Fontaine claims (with tongue cemented to her cheek), the future could lead them beyond the realm of games and iphone applications, into “… augmented reality t-shirts, and scratch and sniff with hypercolor record sleeves … It could involve covering each other in gold paint and motion tracking flying monkeys around us."

Now that, we'd like to see.

~

More From Champagne Valentine

Tate Modern, Turbine Hall - Promoting a new show in the Turbine Hall that includes an accompanying iphone app to give people the chance to experience some location based gameplay at the gallery.

My Lover the Server - New exhibition in Amsterdam called My Lover the Server, all about the phenomenon of romance over the internet. (Be warned, when we tried to load the website, it totally crashed our browsers.)

Showreel: www.vimeo.com/3471330
Studio site: www.champagnevalentine.com
(For a treat, click on the skull in the menu then go to their "research and art" section.)