Then we set off with the Red Bull Volvo to do some projector bombing on the street – and this was really great fun!

The photos below were taken from our first stop – outside Kino OkO.

The gable end of this block of flats made a brilliant ‘canvas’ for drawing and the on-board sound system in the Red Bull car soon attracted a big crowd.

Our next stop was in Dlouha outside Roxy/Nod, a very popular club and gallery in the centre of Prague.

Despite the narrowness of the street and bright lighting Kuba managed to angle the projector to make a huge drawing area for me on the front of the building next to the club. A big crowd soon gathered on the street, with lots of people taking photos. My new, beautiful Tagtoool All-in-one performed perfectly and was ideal for working on the street! Dima set it up and dismantled it very quickly – and in between managed to take these photos as well.

Dima was so busy managing the equipment that he didn’t take many photos on the two evenings that we went projector bombing with the Red Bull car during the Lunchmeat Festival – but he was able to shoot some video on the first night when it wasn’t raining. It’s all a bit shaky and hand held but I think it captures really well the atmosphere of working with the Tagtool outside. The first clip is from the roof terrace session at DOX.

The two clips below were shot outside the cinema BIO OKO and the club/gallery Roxy/NOD in the centre of Prague. While I was drawing we had a DJ operating the sound system in the Red Bull car, but Dima has used these two tracks by Mihaly Vig, ‘Valuska’ and ‘Oskigyo’ for the videos.

The festival organisers are making an official video of the whole event, which should also include some footage of our Saturday night performance at the Meetfactory. When this comes out I will post a link on the blog.

Here are photos of the performance on the roof terrace at DOX Gallery.

As it was a real jam session I decided to make a sequence of both abstract and figurative images for this setting. Here are photos of the two musicians who provided the live accompaniment for my drawing.

It was the sound system in the Red Bull car that was used for music to accompany the street projections.

Below are some more photos from the street session outside BIO OKO.

In order to cover the whole height of the building Kuba held the projector on its side – a great idea that worked really well – but drawing was much more difficult, as either I had to stand sideways or try remember that when I moved the pen up on the tablet, the line went down on the building and movement left showed up as movement right!

Unfortunately, on Thursday evening it was seriously wet – not the best weather for projector bombing!

I was the lucky one, cowering inside the van (although this proved to be not the most comfortable position for drawing!)

But despite the bad weather this was a great projection location.

As well as ‘drawing’ on the wall I was able to incorporate the statue in the niche into the pictures.

When we moved to the next location we parked the van next to the Red Bull car in the car park end-on to the wall. With the back door of the van raised to form a ‘roof’, a raincoat draped over the back of the Tagtool to give extra protection from the rain and the projector inside the van sitting on the tailgate, this was a much more comfortable drawing position for me.

The audience was not so lucky!

My projection area fell within one of the ‘loops’ of the permanent mural that covers this big wall and as there was a lot of ambient light at this location I chose not to use the transparency slider but instead concentrate on making big bold images in pure colours.

I ended the session with a bit of advertising for the remaining events of the festival!

It had been great fun, although we all went home very wet – and glad that our performance on Saturday at the Meetfactory would be indoors!

Dima has just finished making me this super powerful new All-in-one Tagtool (and it’s left handed of course!). I’m so pleased with it that I thought I’d do a posting showing how he made it. With the lid on it measures 52.5 x 77.5 x 27.5 cms and is made using the Adam Hall Easy Case System.
The computer fits inside this flight case and the Wacom tablet and Tagtool are attached underneath the (removable) drawing surface that fits inside the lid. There is enough space under the drawing surface next to the computer to store all the cables and also the projector – and even with all this inside I can still lift it by myself (just!)

Fitting together all the components for the computer – the part of the process that I know Dima likes best! He decided to use a very cheap (and therefore light) computer case for this.

Next came the measuring and cutting of the material for the flight case – a much less less exciting task and very important to do accurately!

Then all the parts just had to be slotted together and riveted in place.

The photos below show how we fitted the Wacom tablet into the work surface – and fortunately there was just enough of the aluminium strips left over from making the case to make the two ‘rails’ (which fitted perfectly!) to hold the tablet in place.

The next task was to make the back so that the drawing surface would be sloping when in use.
(The hinge came off an old mirror that we found on a rubbish dump…as usual, no project of ours is complete without a bit of recycling!)

After that Dima drilled and cut this plastic work surface in order to fit the sliders, arduino and the big red button for the Tagtool.

Then it was time to solder all the wires for the Tagtool – another tricky operation requiring patience and concentration!

Below is a view of the interior of the flight case showing the luggage straps that secure the computer in position inside.

This photo shows the finished case all packed up and ready to go. It is lockable, has extra side handles for easy carrying and air vents in the base for the fans when the computer is running.

I’m really looking forward to using it – and as we have two performances in Prague this week, at DOX Gallery on Wednesday evening and at the Meetfactory on Saturday night as part of the Lunchmeat Festival, Dima has finished my new Tagtool just in time!

The Berlin clubcafe Wendel hosts a Tagtool session once a month as part of their evening events programme and we were very pleased to be invited by Andreas Dzialocha to perform there. Wendel is a very nice venue – definitely worth checking out if you are in Berlin. As usual, setting up everything is Dima’s job so I had time to take a few photos before sitting down to draw. During the performance Dima took some video which I will put in my next posting but for the rest of the photos below I have to thank our friends Ernst Altmann and Markus Dorninger who came and kindly agreed to take photos for me.The three musicians – Edith Steyer, Manuel Miethe and Michael Esch. And, just for the record, a couple of shots of me and Dima ‘in action’!

Our Tagtool performance was a real jam session – although the three musicians knew each other and had played together on previous occasions they had no time to rehearse or to practise working with the drawn and video images before the performance began.There is no doubt that having live music and a receptive audience is definitely the best recipe for an enjoyable Tagtool performance!

For this posting I have chosen just a few images from the (literally) hundreds that Ernst took during the performance.

The photos above provide a much more vivid impression of my Tagtool drawing than they do of Dima’s underlying video but I think that the images below capture something of the interaction between the two mediums.

Both the musical accompaniment and the length of this performance meant that I had an opportunity to exploit the full range of the mark-making possibilities of the Tagtool – and so it seemed appropriate that not all of my drawing was figurative. Below are two sets of stills from some of the more abstract sequences.

I am certain that the stimulus provided both by the music and the video clips enabled me to produce a more interesting and wider range of images than would have been possible had I been drawing alone. To obtain a more complete view of the different ‘episodes’ in the drawing sessions I have arranged all of Ernst’s photos into 14 photo albums.

This is the first video of part of the final performance and party held on 25 September in Tulln, Austria to mark the end of the three week Waga @ Kunstwerkstatt event featuring the Wassergasse crew and their friends. It showcases a music/dance performance by Steve Buchanan with iink, Frances and Maki (Tagtools)

The evening began with a stunning audiovisual installation by Malu and Maki
and continued with performances from guests:

Frances and Dima (Tagtool)
Steve Buchanan (Music/Dance)
Christian Reiner (Microfon)
Chann (Electronics)

More photos of the rehearsal, performance and party can be found on Frances’s Drawinglive News blog.

Last Saturday was my birthday – what better excuse to have a big Tagtooling weekend! Our Tagtool friends from Austria arrived on Friday and the party began right away with drinks in the kitchen and then after dinner everyone went into the studio to set up the equipment.

It required the combined efforts of Matthias, Seppi, Jörg and Dima to get the visitors’ extra projectors, different video cameras and Tagtools to all work together but quite soon they had everything set up and ready to go.

For the first jam session they had the projectors focused on one wall only behind our new performance corner but on Sunday they were able to reorganise the set up to have all four projectors and two Tagtools working so that it was possible for two people to draw together across both walls – a really huge and exciting projection area!

On Saturday I didn’t take any photos but instead spent all my time either drawing or partying (especially partying!!)….so most of the pictures above are from our Sunday jamming – when we continued drawing intensively until well after midnight! Matthias, Jan, Seppi, Die. Puntigam and I all drew and in my next posting on our Drawinglive blog I will have the video clips that Dima is putting together from the material that he, Jörg and Seppi recorded during the weekend.

When a group of people get together to draw like this it is always a lot of fun – but it is also a very interesting and illuminating experience. You discover such a lot, not only about how other people go about drawing, but I find that when I draw with someone else I learn new things about how I draw as well. All too soon it was time to pack up the Tagtools and head for home – but we will all meet up next month at the Chink Chank in Tulln – and that will be another great collective drawing opportunity!

At the weekend we had a rehearsal in our studio when I took these photos of the first practice session.

This rehearsal was really useful as it gave me an opportunity to listen carefully to the sounds of the instruments before I started to draw. Then we each made up a ‘story’ which would set the scene for the three performance improvisations. In order that Martin and Bethany could see my drawing projected on the wall behind them while they were playing, Dima set up a monitor in front of their table. I put a clock on my table so that I could check the pace of my drawing. This arrangement worked very well in our studio and by the end of the session we had agreed on the shape of the three pieces for the performance.

The venue was quite small, a vaulted cellar in a very old building in the centre of the city. I had not been there before and when we arrived at 5.30pm for the sound check I discovered (to my horror!) that the whole place was painted matt black. I realised that I would have to adjust my drawing ideas very quickly! Some of the tonal gradations that I had planned to use were not possible as the black walls just soaked up the Tagtool colours and using the transparency slider was also really tricky. In order to see the stage I had to stand on a ledge at the back of the auditorium with our flight case upended on top of a small table to make a work station for my Tagtool, drawing tablet and computer, but as there was a large audience this improvisation proved both necessary and successful. There was a very neat ceiling mount for our projector and video camera that was adjustable and hooked over the lighting rig, so in the end the whole set up worked well, despite the black drawing surface.

This is a photo of the drawing and recording set up. Because of the low light in the attic we had to use a Nizo 481 Macro Super8 camera. Dima made the wooden box to contain our projector and mounted it on a second tripod to illuminate my drawing area – a ‘stage’ where the curved surface of a huge cylindrical water tank formed the backdrop while a big wooden door and one of the beams supporting the roof formed the wings. In front of the door was an old car seat. A solitary ‘actor’ (Dima!) appears and disappears in the course of the drawing process.

We developed the Super8 film at the Filmwerkplaats and on our return home Dima did this home-made telecine transfer of the filmed footage. This process unfortunately loses the very special quality that celluloid gives to the images and, being a DIY job, it is a bit shaky and uneven but I think it gives quite a good impression of the session none the less. I am posting this version now but we plan to do optical printing on 16mm film and add a specially composed soundtrack.
The music that we chose to accompany this version is The Alban Berg Quartet’s recording of Berg’s String Quartet, op. 3.