There is a videoclip, one of the most curios, funny and classy that Mtv has ever seen. On music notes and rhythmic created by Vitalic, a genius of the French electronic movement, a lot of dogs and puppies are flying in slow motion, a great contrast with the music. Expressions and funny positions of the animals contrast with the aseptic scenery of lasers.
A quite simple video, as some of you may think, but please, don’t judge it before watching it. Birds, the name of the video, show to the world the name of Pleix, French group of graphics and video artists. To tell you the truth, they’ve already directed videos, for example E-baby, Beauty Kit and Simon for people like Basement Jaxx, Kid606, Bliss, Plaid. In the last 5 years they became important in the world of author videoclip, even if they didn’t produce a huge number of works, considering Cunnignham, Gondry, Lynn Fox or Floria Sigismondi.
We met there to interview them, a unique event considering their will to be anonymous but also the fact that they dislike talking about their work. But we couldn’t miss such a special opportunity…
Alessandra Migani: Besides your choice to keep your identity anonymous – I have to confess that I absolutely love the picture of you all together and noticed that maybe somebody wears glasses. How did you start to work together as a collective and what is your method?
Pleix: Pleix is a community of digital artists (graphic designers, 3d artists, musicians…) willing to mix their skills to gain greater freedom for various projects. The Pleix touch could be a common work on limits, contradictions and accidents that show the fragility of the digital world. These artists produce tension by joining together heterogeneous graphics, videos and sounds.We are all based in Paris . It’s true, we never put our inviduals name but sign our different projects
under the name of PLEIX. Pleix is not a company…just a group of various artists. We work together since 2001 but we know each other since before we created Pleix. We are all complementary technically and creatively and it’s an ideal situation for us to be together. Bleip is part of the collective, he is a musician and a video editor. He released an EP called “+1” (Sound Silent/ La Baleine ). Working together is a great help, we all beleive that image, sound & edit are all equaly important.
We find our inspiration in our society, our world full of contradictions. We usually try to have a few readings in our films, a bit like a subliminal message… You can watch our videos without thinking of it or notice it and find something more sensitive. People are free to see what they want. We are not so different from other artists but we’ve got our tastes, our own desires, our sense of humour… Beeing 7 makes our inspiration sources very large, coming from many different fields like cinema, art, TV, comic books and , cartoons etc.. We love beeing supprised ! We love sharing our work with the public. That’s why we like all kind of different fields to show our films, exhibitions, festivals, internet, TV etc…
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Alessandra Migani: Your website is simple but very communicative, looks as a perfect meeting point for those who are interested in visual arts, how does it interact with your work?
Pleix: That’s right, our web site is simple to read and easy to update and it is the perfect place to share our last projects ! When we finish a film, we put it right away on the web, we all Love internet…
Alessandra Migani: How do you work with musicians? Do you talk with the artists about the concept or do you develop your own idea? It looks like you have been working only with electronic musicians, is this a choice or just happened?
Pleix: As we mentioned before, we find our inspiration in our society, our world…When we like a track, wee focused on the music to find a narrative line and an idea coame to us. Most of the time, we are free to do what we want and most of the time, we never met the band !! It’s always very cool to do a video clip but lot’s of work !!!
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Alessandra Migani: Thinking about your different experiences, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Cube in Issy-les-Moulineaux, do you enjoy working within a museum institution? Do you feel that the expression of your work is challenging almost like the work itself?
Pleix: Creation doesn’t stick to one space. For us, making exhibitions with some installation, make us think about our creation differently, in a different context. Found a “real space”, talking with “real body” is very important in this virtual world ! Installations allow us to take our time, to freeze an instant for a project and also to let the space between real worl and imaginary worl spongious !
Alessandra Migani: What are you working on at this moment?
Pleix: We just finished an exhibition in : “D-Day le design aujourd’hui “, Contemporary Art Museum of Paris Centre Georges Pompidou (Juin 2005 to October 2005) and an other in Palais des Beaux arts de Lille “Volupté numériques” (december 2005 to February 2006)…
We’ll participate to NEMO’s festival in Paris (7-13 April 2006, to an exhibition called “Videotheque Mobile” (April 26th to may 27th) in Paris, also in ” La Force de l’art”, a collective exhibition about french creation in Le Grand Palais in Paris (9 mai-25 juin 2006), in Toulouse, a special Pleix presentation in Centre Culturel> Bellegarde (9-13 May 2006) At the moment we are working on a new commercial for the US and a new “personnal” Pleix film that we’ll be ready in few month !!We are also showing our films in many different festivals (onedotzero, Resfest etc…) And we expect to release a Pleix dvd soon…may be at the end of this year ! A new adventure for us !
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Alessandra Migani: One very last question: who is the dog on the homepage?
For our film BIRDS, we’ve made a casting of 11 dogs. We have made some reshearch on all dogs races, trying to find the ones that had a strong personnality. Some of them where “professional”, some are just normal dogs. We don’t know them “personnally” !!!.