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The first ‘action’ of 2012 – our friends, the Austrian musicians Margaret Unknown and Cellardoor, playing together in the studio……As well as recording the sessions, Dima took this opportunity to experiment with some 360° photography and I joined in with some Tagtool drawing. He took lots of ‘normal’ photos as well – the one above, looking down on to the studio floor from the projection room, shows the whole set up (you will note the usual jumble of wires and other bits of equipment!) – I am drawing and the musicians playing. The pale-coloured disc visible in the centre of this photo is the silver ball positioned for the video capture (the camera is on the tripod directly beneath it) and below, here is a close up of the ball showing the reflection of the studio.I made this collage from a selection of Dima’s photos of the musicians playing.And now here are a few shots that include my Tagtool drawing….

From Frances and Dima
All the best for 2012!

Our New Year card originated from this screenshot of one of the Tagtool drawings that I did recently during our skiing holiday in Livigno, Italy.I altered the original image using one of the new applications available in the latest edition of Picasa. There are now so many different effects, some really subtle and others quite bizarre – but all great fun and easy to use. Here are some experiments that I made with a couple of my other Tagtool drawings. Above is the original image and below some ‘altered states’ courtesy of Picasa!


Below, another of my drawings – followed by some Picasa ‘variations’!


Really scary, eh!!

Dima made five short videos from the concert given by Margaret Unknown and Tembryo at Café V lese in Prague on Sunday 27 November. You can find all of them on this Vimeo channel but I have posted the two here where I think that the combination of sound and visuals works best.

On Sunday 27 November there was a concert by Margaret Unknown and Tembryo in the newly opened cellar bar of Café V lese and they asked me if I would provide some live Tagtool drawing for their performance.Although this is a very nice large space, doing drawing here was not at all easy because of the low ceiling and the pillars that obscured the view, and also because the four musicians were spaced very widely across the big stage area with its corner steps. In order to see the projection the only light source for the stage,which was a ceiling-mounted bare light bulb, had to be switched off during the performance. This meant that my Tagtool drawing was the only source of light for the musicians while they were playing and although the corner stage, doorway and uneven brick walls made a most interesting setting for drawing there was a lot of distortion and overlap from the two projectors for me to cope with as well.Because, as can be seen in the photo above from my first drawing sequence, the musicians became almost hidden in the combination of my drawn and their real shadows, for the remainder of the performance I drew mostly abstract patterns to complement their experimental-psychedelic music, concentrating on trying to make the four musicians visible as well as providing a series of background images for their performance. Despite the difficulty of making an interesting background image while at the same time providing enough illumination so that the musicians could see to play, I ended the performance by drawing this dark cityscape.

Dima videoed the whole of Nathan Bell‘s performance with my Tagtool drawing. I really enjoyed making these visuals to accompany Nathan’s performance!
He played for about three quarters of an hour and you can find the complete performance uploaded in six parts on this separate Vimeo channel – http://vimeo.com/channels/266513
Here is the first video clip – after viewing it I hope you will visit the Vimeo channel to see the rest of the performance.

This is a real ‘blast from the past’ – a video from 2008 of part of the performance at Evolution Night Vol 2 in Club Skutečnost, Prague. At the time I was not aware that anyone was making a video so I was very pleased to discover after the performance this clip by CIANT on the Internet. It’s now three years on, almost to the day, so I thought I would post it on the blog…..

Club Skutečnost was located in a labyrinth of interconnecting cellars with widely differing ceiling heights and the small stage in the club was set so high up that a ladder was the only means of access for performers. There was a very nice big back projection screen that stretched from one side of the stage to the other but by the time that the musicians had set up all their equipment the only space available for us to work was a small alcove in the side wall in which we were more or less hidden from both audience and performers. Also, this meant that I had only a very oblique view of a small section of the projection screen while drawing. To this difficulty was added the problem of setting up my laptop plus a separate computer screen which we had covered with a (homemade) black box hood to isolate the drawing area of the Corel Painter programme that I was using, the tripod-mounted video camera, Dima’s Edirol V4 Mixer and a small desk and chair so that I could sit to draw – all of which had to be jammed somehow into this one small corner. Of course Dima had to carry all of this equipment up the ladder on to the stage (and back down again afterwards) – these were definitely not the ideal circumstances for a live drawing performance!
However, Anja and Bethany were happy with the visuals accompanying their music and the audience also seemed to like my drawings. This encouraged us to try to look for some other (easier/better) way to make live drawing performances so we searched the Internet – and discovered Tagtool!

And the rest, as they say, is history!

Here is the video of the opening performance –
the electric guitar solo by Margaret Unknown
(our friend Max, from Vienna.)

In this performance, for the live Tagtool drawing accompaniment to Max’s improvisation, I decided to make a sequence of entirely abstract visuals, concentrating on exploiting the different textural and layering effects that can be achieved using the transparency slider and fading.

On Saturday we went to Kolin with Max Bogner, the Austrian guitarist aka Margaret Unknown to do a guitar and Tagtool performance at Mark and Sonia’s ‘Divo and Holubnik’ evening concert.Max’s guitar solo with my live drawing background was the first item on the programme. Of course I wasn’t able to take any photos while I was drawing, but Dima made a recording of Max’s performance that I will put in a later posting.But I did manage to take these photos and made the collage above of the next performer on the programme, the musician ŠOUMEN from Kolin. I enjoyed this performance a lot, but because the vocals were in Czech unfortunately I was not able to catch all the nuances of language that were obviously very much appreciated by the (mainly local) audience.The next artist on the programme was the American instrumentalist Nathan Bell and although he hadn’t seen any of my drawing except for the visuals that I did when Max was playing earlier in the evening he said he was happy for me to jam with him in his performance. For his compositions he used a combination of banjo, bells, drum and voice – really great music for drawing! I will post Dima’s video of this performance later – here is one drawing sequence from his photos.

Here is the (very short – less than a minute long!) video that Dima took of some of our Tagtool drawing at the 15th anniversary party of NIX.cz. The music is an excerpt from ‘Historia de pescador’ by Batukatum, who were also performing at the party.

Once Dima had put in position the Tagtool and the two projectors there wasn’t really enough space to set up another tripod for video – hence the hand held quality of this little recording.But throughout the evening Dima took loads of photos of my drawings – and the full set can be found in this Picasa web album.

The music and theatre club Malostranska Beseda occupies the first floor of an impressive late renaissance building (that was formerly Prague’s City Hall) in the centre of the historic Mala Strana district of the city – very grand surroundings indeed for our live drawing performance at the private party given by NIX.cz on the occasion of the company’s 15th anniversary!Our double projection covered the full width of the wall of the chill out room for the party – which was great for Tagtooling despite the fact that with coloured spotlights and the chandelier lit while the cold buffet was being served, the room was quite light. The drawing below, which had an animation of flying birds and a happy anniversary message for the opening of the reception, was to ‘set the scene’ for the first of the after dinner performances in the theatre, from the Brazilian percussion group Batukatum and the Rio Dance Show.
The niches and alcoves with the vaulted pillars between them made this a much more interesting surface for drawing than a plain flat wall….

…and once the buffet was served and the chandelier switched off leaving only the more intimate lighting from the coloured spotlights, suddenly the projection appeared to be much brighter and more dramatic.As the guests were moving backwards and forwards between the theatre, bar and chill out room during the course of the evening, we were able to do a variety of drawing sequences and animations. Dima took many photos – here is a selection.I made use of the niches to do a bit of slightly scary trompe d’oeil drawing…I don’t know how much of the background would appear in their photo!Here are photos of what Dima always refers to as, ‘one of your Lady Macbeths’!In this photo our projection is seen through the doorway from the bar.For us it was a really nice evening of drawing – and we also enjoyed the superb buffet and friendly company – so, happy 15th anniversary from us to NIX.cz!