Monthly Archives: August 2010

I was so sorry that we didn’t capture any of our Tagtool sessions on video as our photos don’t really capture the festival atmosphere. However, we discovered that Lukas had taken some video footage, but mostly of the musicians downstairs playing on the mobile stage at the entrance to the studios. Dima made this edit of the parts that have some Tagtool in the background.

There were a number of people watching our Tagtool sessions that had camcorders or were holding up mobile phones, so if anyone reading this has any more footage of our performances we would be really pleased to see it.

After two nights of Tagtooling and partying we were all extremely tired so on Sunday evening we locked the gate to the roof terrace and had dinner followed by a small private Tagtool party with some friends. Dima repositioned the projectors so that instead of having two drawing areas Lennie and I could draw together with our two Tagtools on the ‘screen in the sky’.The ‘back’ and ‘front’ views of our pre-dinner session. After dinner we took it in turns to draw. Lennie and Mick were first at the Tagtools.Then it was Dima and Francesca’s turn to draw.I made this final image of the evening – Goodbye Hackney Wicked!It had been a really great weekend!

Despite a shower of rain that fortunately didn’t last very long (and under the gazebo we, and all our equipment, were completely dry), the Friday night party went on till morning so there was not much time to rest before we had to get ready for the Saturday performance. We had been told that our biggest audience was likely to be on Friday night but there seemed to be just as many people on Saturday – which was great! There was a lot of interest in the Tagtool and after we had been drawing for some time, although there wasn’t very much room under the gazebo, Lennie invited one or two people to come and have a go – which was a very good idea, as it gave us some time to have a much needed break from drawing!

I began the evening drawing on the wall mounted screen.On the wall I think that these big, bold and simple images worked best. When I tried something more subtle with lots of transparency, like the piece below, it got rather lost in the pattern and texture of the brickwork and window frames.As on Friday evening, after a while Lennie and I swapped screens and I made these drawings on the ‘screen in the sky’.As the night went on, for some reason most of my photos seemed to be a bit out of focus…..!Once we had dismantled our Tagtool equipment the DJs took over and the evening ended with some serious partying. Needless to say I didn’t manage to take any more photos and just concentrated on having a good time!

Quite a big crowd had gathered even before Lennie Lee and I began to draw at 9pm on Friday evening. By the time it was really dark both the roof terrace and the lane were packed solid and the road outside was full of people too. We drew continuously till midnight – 3 hours – a real marathon! There were too many people to enable us to take any video footage but we did manage to take quite a lot of still shots both from the roof terrace and also from the road.The photos below show a couple of images from the drawings I did on the wall opposite the roof terrace.First I drew on the wall while Lennie drew on the ‘floating’ screen, then we changed places and I took this photo of Lennie drawing on the wall.It didn’t really matter that the drawing area on the wall was larger than our screen but fortunately Dima was able to position the projector for the ‘screen in the sky’ so that the drawing area fitted it exactly. Here are some of my aerial Tagtool images from our evening’s drawing.

It was an easy job to assemble our new screens in the studio. Putting them into position was much trickier!Many thanks to Ash and Barry for their expert help in getting one screen floating in the air above the lane and the other safely positioned on the wall opposite the roof terrace.  As the photos below show, this required some acrobatics……Once this ‘floating’ screen was in position I just couldn’t wait for darkness to try it out!The next task was to prepare the projection area. Our new gazebo was easy to erect and just the right size to fit the end of the roof terrace.To shelter the Tagtools, projectors, sound system and other electronics, Dima and Lukas improvised this L-shaped work station under the gazebo from some old doors and other bits and pieces. We were all ready to begin!