Nick Jevons and Ross Chapple Create Imagery for I Hate Models with CHAUVET Professional

	Visible to the audience only from the booth's tiered platforms, the high-output fixtures created glowing, reflective light of the metal set, which accentuated the brutalist aura around the stage.

"I Hate Models," the stage name of French techno music producer and DJ Guillaume Labadie, says that he chose said name because of his abhorrence for literal models or genres that put creativity into boxes.

Taking place in a 12,000-sq.-m. space at Hall 1, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles in January, the show Refract: I Hate Models All Night Long kicked off at 10pm and lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Enhancing the experience at the spacious venue was a visual production by Nick Jevons and Ross Chapple, of Auratecture.

Describing the show with its 360-degree stage and asymmetrical design, Jevons calls it as a combination of "brutalist asymmetry and Mayan-like scenography." Elaborating, he says, "For us, Brutalist asymmetry meant raw mass plus deliberate imbalance. It is the look of a structure that is too heavy, too stubborn, or too functional to bother aligning itself perfectly. We wanted to prioritize function over visual comfort. We reference Mayan civilization because of the architecture and how they used sheer size in their structures it to show power, and the doorways of their temples often represented a cave, which were seen as portals to the underworld, while all set in a scene from a movie set."

A collection of 60 CHAUVET Professional STRIKE Array 4C blinders, placed in the "inner sanctum" of the massive central DJ booth, was instrumental in bringing this vision to life. Visible to the audience only from the booth's tiered platforms, the high-output fixtures created glowing, reflective light of the metal set, which accentuated the brutalist aura around the stage.

"Our vision was to create a chaotic and industrial energy underneath the booth's walkways," Jevons says. "The Strike 4C was the perfect choice for this, as we got the wide, bright throw of a blinder combined with the ability to chase and strobe them at high speeds. The fixtures' intense output, combined with their color rendering (RGB plus amber), gave us the ability to apply the overall color palette of the show around the booth through the dense fog and haze. This greatly enhanced the transformative atmosphere in the room."

Jevons, Chapple, and their team (Jean-Denis Rolland, technical director and production manager), and rigger S Group Live Event spread strobe lighting throughout the room to accentuate the starkly intense mood. Their shared vision was to create a "desert scene, much like you would see in the Dune movies with scorched sunsets, deep reds, sandy CTOs, bold open whites," Jevons says.