Digital artists and filmmakers Nicolas Blies and Stéphane Hueber-Blies take the helm of VELVET FLARE. The Luxembourg-based company is placing the development of proprietary technologies for creators at the heart of its strategy, with the international market as its primary growth horizon.
BLIESBRO, the duo formed by Nicolas Blies and Stéphane Hueber-Blies, takes the helm of VELVET FLARE with a clear ambition: to develop creative technologies from Luxembourg for artists, studios, producers and cultural institutions around the world. This ambition also builds on BLIESBRO’s international experience.
For more than ten years, the work of Nicolas Blies and Stéphane Hueber-Blies has been presented at international festivals, institutions and events. Their immersive installation Ceci est mon cœur has notably been presented in Venice and Cannes, bringing their work to audiences and industry professionals from around the world.
This experience directly informs VELVET FLARE’s new strategy: to conceive technologies in Luxembourg while designing them from the outset to travel beyond its borders.
The ambition to develop proprietary technologies
This new strategy is already taking shape around two families of proprietary technologies initiated by BLIESBRO: creative tools such as FLUO, FLOW and REC/CREATE, and technology solutions, in particular RAINBOW CREATIVE, whose main application is Ceci est mon cœur, and OMNILOCATOR, developed as part of Les Gens de la Pluie.
With these first five developments, VELVET FLARE is progressively building an ecosystem designed to support different stages of the creative process, from experimentation to production, while enabling new forms of interaction between content, spaces and audiences.
The objective is concrete: identify challenges faced by creators, develop technological solutions to address them, and turn those solutions into tools that can be used across different projects, disciplines and countries.
Turning creative needs into technologies
VELVET FLARE starts from a situation familiar to many artists: having a clear idea but not having the right tool to bring it to life.
The company therefore develops its technologies in response to needs identified in real-world creative contexts.
FLUO, FLOW and REC/CREATE form the first family of Creator Tools developed by VELVET FLARE. They are designed as tools that creators can integrate directly into their creative workflows.
RAINBOW CREATIVE and OMNILOCATOR are the company’s first Core Tech Solutions: technological building blocks designed to enable the development of new creative systems and applications.
This structure reflects VELVET FLARE’s new philosophy: developing both tools that creators can directly make their own and technologies capable of providing the foundation for new experiences.
From the outset, these technologies are designed to be reusable, scalable and deployable across different contexts, rather than being limited to a single work or installation.
VELVET FLARE aims to progressively build a portfolio of proprietary technologies with applications across film, digital arts, scenography, live performance, music, museums, installations and interactive experiences.
From artwork to tool
BLIESBRO’s arrival at the helm of VELVET FLARE brings together two fields that are still too often separated: artistic creation and technology development.
For more than ten years, Nicolas Blies and Stéphane Hueber-Blies have developed projects combining film, animation, music, digital art and immersive technologies.
In their work, technology always responds to a specific creative intention: creating an interaction, changing the relationship between a work and its audience, working differently with space, or enabling a narrative form that did not previously exist.
This transition from artwork to tool lies at the heart of the company’s new model.
A laboratory for artists and engineers
VELVET FLARE aims to bring together artists, designers, developers, engineers and researchers around its tools.
Creators identify the use cases. Technical teams build the solutions. Prototypes are tested in real-world situations. User feedback then drives the evolution of the products.
This method makes it possible to start not only from what is technically possible, but from what creators are actually trying to achieve.
It also allows a technology conceived within one discipline to find new applications in another: a tool initially designed for an installation could later be used in a performance, film, concert, exhibition or museum.
Building an international ecosystem from Luxembourg
Around these technologies, the company aims to build a network of creators, studios and institutional partners in Luxembourg, across Europe and internationally, exposing its tools to different practices, disciplines and cultural contexts.
As artists, we have often had to build the tools we needed to bring our ideas to life. With VELVET FLARE, we want to turn that experience into an entrepreneurial approach: creating technologies in Luxembourg that artists can use in Berlin, Paris, Montreal, London, Tokyo or anywhere else. Our ambition is not simply to build tools for our own projects, but to see what other creators will invent with them.
These collaborations will enable VELVET FLARE to test its technologies in real-world situations, identify new applications and evolve its products through direct contact with their users.
This approach will also enable VELVET FLARE to progressively build intellectual property developed in Luxembourg but conceived from the outset for an international market.
The ambition is therefore not simply to create new technologies for the creative industries.
