Tagtool

When Ritsche asked me to join RZM as a guest for a gig in the Ukraine, among other things I was up for it because I saw a good opportunity to combine Tagtooling with traditional painting. We already had made some steps into that direction, but this was different. Whereas before we had treated the painting surface more like a canvas for both analogue and digital painting, the work of RZM is focused on the whole space, and the movement within it.

Wall of Light is a live digital drawing installation using the Tagtool which debuted at the Illuminating York Festival 2009. It was produced in collaboration between GaiaNova Productions Ltd and OMA international. Here’s a video featuring interviews with some of the participating artists. Read on to see the full artist sessions!

OMA International and Gaianova present ten days of finest Tagtool action in York, UK. The ancient Multangular Tower of Museum Gardens will be “The Wall of Light”, a canvas for daily artist performances and free-for-all Tagtool sessions as part of the Illuminating York festival, from the 23rd of October till the 1st of November.

May 2009 was a busy month. Among many performances, one thing stood out: the use of the Tagtool with dancers and circus artists. These sessions were experiments, fragments of a bigger picture that is still taking shape. Here are some happy accidents on video.

In March 2009, contemporary art space Choque Cultural of São Paulo, Brazil, ran an exhibition which showed works by four crews out of the Buenos Aires Street Art scene – as good an excuse as any for a large scale Tagtool session.

A video in four parts, in German, of a performance of “Bienenkino” by Tetete on May 29th 2009 at Stadtgarten Cologne. The audience was made up of kids from various schools. They were a little unsure what to make of it all to begin with – but by the end the guys had clearly won them over.

The Hilti Ensemble was invited to Slovakia to take part in the Use the City festival, an initiative leading up to Košice’s reign as European Capital of Culture in 2013. Here’s a video of their improvisational performance at Urbanova tower.

Two weeks ago, we noticed a few Youtube videos from Tagtool sessions in Brazil with some nice scenes, like this city street. But we were especially intrigued by the fact that the Tagtool was changing color, glowing in the hue of the brush. Read on to find out about the mysterious chameleon Tagtool and the philosophy behind it.

Here’s our account of Tagtool Think Tank 09, featuring videos of the talks. Looking back at the event, we couldn’t have imagined a better outcome. We had a weekend of very focused and fruitful discussions, invaluable advice from people we respect for what they do, and a lot of ideas. A real Think Tank in the aquarium-of-ideas sense.