Monthly Archives: October 2014

We provided the visuals for Cartonnage‘s performance on Friday night – a one and a half hour show on the main stage of the Palác Akropolis concert venue.Above, Thursday night – preparing the stage. The orchestra was to be separated from the band by this curtain of transparent tulle on which I would draw.Above, the enormous theatre projector and below, my ‘test’ drawing to try it out.All of the band’s seventeen songs for the concert were under five minutes long. We were able to listen to the playlist beforehand and for some songs we prepared a ‘background’ Tagtool drawing against which I could draw live at the performance; for others we used live animation – so it was quite a complicated set up, with Dima having to do a lot of last-minute patching to make sure everything worked! The combination of the theatre lighting and Tagtool drawing on the tulle worked well, despite the fact that we didn’t have time to have a proper rehearsal to check how the different elements of the performance would work all together – which made me extra nervous! Also, Dima didn’t have any time to set up our camera to take photos before the performance, but I looked on musicweb.cz and fortunately found a lot of very nice pictures by Eva Makovská of the concert. Here are some I’ve selected to end this post.The two photos below show how the stage lighting altered the whole atmosphere of my drawing – which added an interesting extra dimension to the visuals!

This BYOB event at the Signal festival, organised by Nicola Pavone (VJ Luper), was held at Podnik Club in Bubenska 1. This impressive Functionalist building formerly owned by the Prague Electricity Company is now home to a variety of design studios, offices and young creative companies. We have Tagtooled here before, as it’s where Lunchmeat have their HQ and club NEONE, but it was the first time that I had drawn on the outside of the main entrance to the building.This presented quite a challenge because of all the windows and there was a lot of ambient light both fixed and from the cars passing on the highway in front of the building. We borrowed two Acer 6000 lumen projectors from Lunchmeat and positioned the Tagtool at the far side of the car park. With this set up (and using our new Honda EU 20i generator to power everything) we were able to cover the full width of the entrance block as a ‘canvas’ for drawing.I was only able to go inside to the club for a few minutes between drawings so I didn’t see much of the other performances or VJ sets – which was a pity as there seemed to be a lot of interesting installations and visuals at the party. But the weather was good, dry and not too cold, and lots of people came outside to see my drawings. Here are some photos that Dima took for me…. Once the last of the lights in the offices had been switched off and the whole of the facade of the building above the entrance was in darkness there was nothing to distract me so I continued to develop this longer sequence of drawing.Using a generator as our power source meant that we didn’t have any wires trailing from the building and across the car park that could be tripped over or accidentally unplugged during the performance. Also, our generator was working continuously for more than four hours, proving conclusively that it has been a really good investment for this kind of outdoor performance.