Monthly Archives: September 2012

On Saturday 29 September at the Kaleidoskop 2012 weekend at mo.ë in Vienna there will be another opportunity to hear the song cycle ‘Animals’ by K.U.N.T.Z. that had its premiere on 13 September in Berlin at Bar Babette. Here are some of Dima’s photos of my visuals from a practice drawing session in our studio…..In our early rehearsals we worked all together in the studio – I drew while Jan and David played live. The drawings in the practice session above were made while listening to a sound recording – it’s not the same thing as working to live music of course, but very important as preparation for a public drawing performance.

Here is a video from the performance in Berlin of one of the songs. The circumstances for Tagtool drawing at Bar Babette were not ideal – there was a lot of ambient light and the position of my Tagtool on the balcony meant that I had a very oblique view of the stage, which made getting the drawing in the ‘correct’ proportion from the audience’s viewpoint very difficult. I think the music in the video is much more interesting than the drawing – but at least it gives some idea of the performance!

We arrived in Vienna on Saturday evening just in time to join Maki in a drawing session using the (soon to be released!) new Tagtool for iPad at the Buskers Festival. This two day event had attracted large crowds of people and many different street performers and musicians to Karlsplatz in the centre of the city.The photo above shows us sitting at the table with our iPads and, in the background, you can see the very neat solution devised by the crew for mounting the projector – it’s an upended folding pub bench with one leg acting as a shelf for the projector and the other secured to a rubbish bin!
It was great to have this opportunity to try out the Tagtool for iPad – and with Maki’s help I soon got to grips with all the various animation features – they’re great fun to use and have a completely different ‘feel’ to the oldschool Tagtool.Above is an iPad screenshot of the final image that Maki and I drew together and below is a photo I took with my little camera of the same image as it appeared (with interesting distortions) when projected onto the façade of the building.I’m so sorry that I didn’t take any video to show the animation – you will just have to imagine the boy nodding his head, bouncing up and down with his arms and tie waving, the tree gently swaying and the dog jumping……..

There are a lot of nice photos of Maki’s solo drawings on the first day this event on the Tagtool facebook page – do check them out!

We just got back from Berlin where our friend Ernst Altmann arranged for us to stage our first public performance of the new music and Tagtool work that we have been developing in the studio with our musician friends K.U.N.T.Z.Bar Babette on Karl-Marx Allee is a very nice venue but as always there was a lot of equipment needed for both music and visuals for the performance. It took Dima all day to get everything set up and working satisfactorily!The visual in the photo above, which accompanied the opening set by Berlin-based musician Axel, is a large scale projection of the mobile made by Ernst Altmann for this event. The mobile itself was installed at the opposite end of the bar with a spotlight trained on it in order to cast an ever-changing shadow on the white curtain behind.I took all these photos of Ernst’s work with my little camera but unfortunately they don’t really capture either the charm of the slowly revolving mobile and its accompanying shadow – or its grand presence when ‘translated’ as a projection on to the full height of the curtain behind the stage.

Dima took both photos and video of the song cycle by K.U.N.T.Z. that formed the centrepiece of the evening’s performances.For each of the seven creatures represented in the songs I made a separate Tagtool image, moving from one scenario to the next as the music progressed. This was a really challenging live drawing project for me – developing seven different drawings in 40 minutes of continuous drawing, and I usually draw people, not animals – but it was great fun to do! Here are a few of Dima’s photos – I will post the full video of the performance later.
The set of Rare/Primitive/Remixes by DJ Al Chem completed the evening’s entertainment and I did some more ‘freestyle’ Tagtool drawings which, because Bar Babette is essentially a glass cube with floor to ceiling white curtains, could be seen in reverse by people sitting at the tables outside as well as in the bar.