Monthly Archives: May 2014

This year the ‘Bring Your Own Beamer’ event was held at the venue Podnik – a very good location for projections, with a big main stage and adjoining gallery space. Our Tagtool was in the area behind the main stage where it was really dark and the projector was set up so I could draw right down to ground level.I did the drawing above quickly in the afternoon to test our set up before Dima had to leave to work at another project. I was a bit nervous being left without him to troubleshoot any problem that might occur with the Tagtool or the projector, but thank goodness everything worked perfectly all night! I started by drawing this monochrome landscape which I photographed at various stages.The opaque Tagtool colour really glowed in the dark! Then I was able to use the fade slider to produce some transparency and finally added some line drawing. The next drawing sequence began in colour and ended in monochrome…Here are two more of my photos from what was a very long night of drawing! The event went on till 5am so I left my drawing from time to time to go and have a look at the other installations and the VJing at the main stage. I was sorry that Dima wasn’t with me to take some video. Instead I will end this post with another sequence of still images.

The Berg orchestra specialises in 20th century and contemporary music in performances which often include theatre, film and video art. I was invited to make a Tagtool drawing to accompany Steve Reich’s ‘City Lights’, one of the four pieces in the programme CITY:RESPIRE presented by the orchestra at their concert in Prague on Monday 5 May. This concert was held in a very unusual location – the partially completed Petřiny metro station. At the morning rehearsal I took the photo above to show this very atmospheric deep underground location. Despite the fact that it was very cold and the platform where the concert was held could only be reached by descending more than 300 steep temporary wooden steps (much easier going down than up!) there were many people standing at the concert as every seat was filled!This is a photo that Dima took during the concert and below is his video of the whole piece. ‘Check it out’!!

Now that the 2014 Lunchmeat Festival is over it is catch-up time for the blog! As part of the events accompanying the festival, we held a two day workshop, ‘Drawing as a Performance Art’, on 5 and 6 April at Lunchmeat’s club, NEONE, and an open air performance by the students at Proluka in Prague on 15 April.

Of the four students who attended the workshop, only one had any prior experience of Tagtool drawing. They produced some nice drawing sequences during the workshop and there are lots of photos on this facebook Tagtool workshop page but I have selected these images to show the range of their work.





For the outdoor session we had the Red Bull car with its sound system and generator to power our equipment and provide the music for the students’ performance – and here is Dima setting up the Tagtool and projectors.It was a very cold and damp evening but despite the bad weather the students kept on drawing until it began to rain really heavily and we had to turn off the projectors and hurriedly pack all the equipment in the van and go home.

So – a big ‘thank you’ to the students, whose hard work ensured that the workshop was such a success, to the Lunchmeat organisers and to Red Bull for providing the power and sound system for the outdoor performance. Also I must thank Markéta Vozková for publishing this article about the workshop in the on-line magazine,’Kulturio’. It is in Czech but has two videos showing us working at NEONE and also a short video showing part of the students’ outdoor performance – do check it out!