Here are two videos and some photos of this rehearsal. They had a setup of two Tagtools and my brother Maki joined Frances with the drawings occasionally:

After that, Frances and Dima invited Supra+ to join them at the Hackney WickED Festival in London, which took place this August. Frances wrote on her blog:

This was our second year at the Hackney WickED Festival and, as last year, we planned two evenings of live Tagtool drawing, making the projections from the roof terrace of Liquid Studios. This year, however, we invited a group of artist friends from Germany and Austria, as well as some old friends from London, to exhibit work at the studios and perform with us. So – everyone was ready to get together and have a good time!

Unfortunately there is no good documentation of this performance at the WickED Festival, but there is a video of a gig they did a day before at the The Victory Pub, Dalston:

Anyway, here are two photos of the setup at the WickED festival:

Another session from A.live festival in Bratislava, this time with iink and Maki:

Last but not least, here are the people I’m talking about:

Margaret Unknown (guitar, voice, lapsteelguitar, nadashwaram)
Chann (drums)
Tagedieb (synthesizer , voice)
Frances Sander (tagtool)

The ensemble is Christian Reiner (voice), Philip Zoubek (piano), Mathias Koch (drums), Matthias Fritz (Tagtool) and Markus Dorninger (Tagtool).

 
Session #1: “Einmal ein Wagen”

Session #2: “Hiltifant”

Session #3: “Filmen verboten” (Part 1)

Session #4: “Filmen verboten” (Part 2)

Session #5: “Das rauchende Kind”

Session #6: “Der Schatten des Mörders”

Session #7: “Der Rudermann”

Tagtool MX is a project developed by Mauricio Gomez Tagtool “Maw” (@ magopo) and designed by Jim Catan (@ Chemical_burn) of Cholula hackerspaces.

It is a local proposal inserted into a global movement (hackerspaces.org) that seeks to generate alternatives to consumer culture, betting on a way to acquire knowledge, goods and services based on reciprocity, transitivity and solidarity with an open, integrated, which gives a synergy of different people doing different things.

Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects.

James “Jim” Catan: Inventor, photographer and addicted to Lego

A graduate of Chemical Engineering Processes with immense degree thesis: “Development of simulation software and atmospheric dispersion of pollutants in the subsurface three-dimensional surface generation of concentration.” Diploma in Photography Black and White in 2000 by Eastman Kodak. It takes 11 years documenting events and 24 playing with Lego robots.

Mauricio “Maw” Gomez Hackergeek, ping pongnero and lover of the tools.

Best known among friends as the Lord of the Arduino. Electronics and Computer Engineer since 2010 as a thesis by a telemetry system, using SMS, for vending machines. The term “pure inventions yours” is not foreign to him. Blog is the editor of Make: Spanish (es.makezine.com) since 2009. There are only two things that can de-stress: welding circuits and baking pies. Thirsty for developing new devices.
toolex.blogspot.com

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!

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to collaborate with Maja Osojnik on a number of projects.

With styles ranging from classical and early folk to chanson, punk, noise, jazz, and experimental music, Maja Osojnik and her Band have given European audiences dynamic and dramaturgically elaborate live performances. They have created a new kind of original music which defies definition: Their mixture of musical genres comes alive in their live performances in a harmonized and spontaneous way.

MAJA OSOJNIK | text, conzept, composition, voice
MICHAEL BRUCKNER-WEINHUBER | guitar
CLEMENS WENGER | akkordeon
PHILIP JAGSCHITZ | piano
BERND SATZINGER | bass
MATTHIAS KOCH | drums
MARKUS DORNINGER | animation & live-drawing
MATTHIAS FRITZ | animation & live-drawing
MARKUS KUSCHER | skirt design

Much praised for the technically versatile 2010 album, Črne Vode (Black Waters), Maja Osojnik arranges and composes songs whose contents touch on existential themes and include social critiques of war, greed, and selfishness. They focus on life stories integrating fate, happiness, love, and death. Osojnik’s original approach to folklore, especially with regard to the interpretation of Slovenian music and the chansons of Fran Milčinski, enables a familiar, dusty tradition to come alive in a modern guise. In her bold cover of the partisan song, “Počiva Jezero V Tihoti,” for instance, it is not a girl waiting in vain for the partisan, but his boyfriend.

Backed by her Austrian band, Osojnik’s album, Črne Vode, displays her skill of weaving diverse musical styles into a complex and inspiring whole. The album, which received the 2010 German Record Critics’ Award, is an intercultural effort: it was recorded in Austria and the lyrics are predominantly in Slovene. However, Osojnik always translates the texts for her Austrian bandmates, who thus manage to grasp the songs’ nuances and dramatic turns. This awareness is audible on the record and becomes tangible in live performances. Osojnik occasionally slows a song down or interrupts it, which the musicians use to create peculiar miniature songs within the songs, evoking jazz, art rock, and minimalism. All of these interventions complement Osojnik’s lyrics, which are inhabited by bums, immigrants, outsiders, losers, the unloved, and the forgotten.

„Maja Osojnik is an eccentric with a priceless sense of humor, who undoubtedly comes from a different point of view than traditional conservative folk song preservation. With her shrill appearance but deep alto voice, she interprets Slovenian folk songs – sometimes with respectful tenderness, sometimes by means of total re-composition…” – Richard Schubert, Balkan Fever Festival

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!

Stiftung Universität Hildesheim
Seminar Farben wirken
8/9.2.011

Laura Tucholski
Miriam Eickhoff
Luzie Sieckenius
Daniel Sigge
David Goldmann

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.

New Tagtool “All in One” by Stuart Childs, Leeds, UK.

With some laser cutting design + help from my friend Aaron, I have built this Tagtool all in one flight case. Based on instructions from the Tagtool website I wanted to make a hardy tool for large scale projection use. Including a Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet, this tool can be plugged into a projector to enable artists to draw on anything they want.

This is the third Tagtool system I have built – previous incarnations have been standalone circuitry that can be plugged into a PC along with a graphics tablet – this time I wanted to build one big box that housed everything.

There is a fairly beastly PC inside running Windows XP and OMA’s open source Nodekit software that connects the graphics tablet, a playstation style gamepad and an Arduino board together to make it all work.

I wanted to keep the flight case as intact as possible to keep it nice and strong. I ended up only drilling two holes in it to mount the monitor arm stand. I will be using this Tagtool for projections, drawing events and outdoor virtual graffiti activities with The Jam Jar Collective. We first tested it out with a group of children in Whitehaven and they seemed to really get into being able to draw on the side of their Civic Hall building.

Hardware used:

1 ex-US Army flight case
3mm laser cut MDF top plate
25mm x 25mm interior wood skeleton
lots of M5 nuts + bolts

Arduino Duemilanove
100mm Panasonic 10k slider potentiometers
One big red button that I found in a junk yard in Portugal with a push to make switch underneath

an old USB keyboard that I stripped out of it’s nasty plastic case
IEC power socket, VGA socket and USB extension ports on the top plate
An old hacked-up Dell case to hold the PC components

Two 80mm computer case fans – one in, one out for cooling

PC specs:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X2 555 Dual Core 3.2GHz
RAM: 4g DDR3

Graphics card: GeForce GT220 with 1g onboard RAM
Hard drive: 128g Kingston SSDNow SATA

400w PSU

“Bienenkino” is improvised live animation, music and narration for kids. The ensemble is part of Tetete, a group of artists aiming to provide quality off-mainstream children’s entertainment. Here’s a recording from “Bienenkino” on September 1st 2010 at Bollwerk in Moers, featuring old and new characters from the Tetete universe.

Christian Reiner – Stimme
Philip Zoubek – Klavier
Mathias Koch – Schlagzeug
Maki Dorninger – Zeichnung
Mathias Fritz – Animation

Here’s another video from the same performance, with interviews and reactions from the kids (also in German only – sorry!)