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Dima has now found the time to begin to edit the video footage from the final performance and party on 25 September at Tulln. In this video Steve Buchanan is foot drumming while I am at the Tagtools drawing with Maki and iink.

There is a lot more video of the various performances that took place at this event so I hope to be able to do another posting quite soon!

We have just returned from another happy Tagtooling event in Tulln!

The photos below show the set up for drawing at the Kunstwerkstatt – four projectors (two of theirs and two of ours – the ones in the home-made wooden boxes secured by Gaffa tape being ours, of course!) and two Tagtools – and in the centre photo Dima carefully positioning the cameras ready to record the event on Saturday night.
My next posting will contain a video of the performance but until it is edited here are a few photos that I took at our rehearsal.Dima and Matthias adjusting the lighting.Malu and Maki reviewing their installation, ‘Istanbul 2010’ which was to open the show.Steve Buchanan’s ‘warm up ‘ session.This photo shows Steve foot drumming with Malu and Maki’s installation in the background.
Once the projectors were adjusted, all the cables secured and lighting checked, the rehearsal evening turned into a bit of a jam session and pre-party party! I took this photo of the final image of the jam session I had with Maki (with Dima in the foreground still searching for the best position for the camera…..)The scale of the projection can clearly be seen in this photo showing Jan and Steve with part of Matthias’s Tagtool drawing and my ‘Imaginary portraits’ on the wall behind them.

Our second Tagtool performance was in the Grand Café cinema where our film, ‘Tales from the Attic’ had been screened the previous evening as part of the programme for the 9th International Super 8mm Festival.The Grand Café cinema, the principal venue for the Festival, is a small modern art-house cinema with a nice intimate atmosphere and good acoustics but as these photos show, once we had set up all our equipment there was not much space left for the DJ or musicians!

Here are two video clips from this performance.

The music in this clip, from the first half of our programme, was provided by by DJ Megyeri from Szeged.

The live music in this clip from the second half is by Szeged musicians, the S8 Improv Trio and their guest, DenesDj from Pécs.

This opening event,’Vote for Super 8!’, was billed as a ‘Performance in Three Movements’, of which our live drawing performance over found Super 8 film footage was the third ‘movement’, but as I only took photos during the first two ‘movements’ I hope to show some video and photos from our part of the performance in a separate posting.This is Dima setting up our equipment before the performance.

The venue was the Old Synagogue in Szeged, a beautifully proportioned neo-classical building dating from 1843. A large audience assembled outside waiting for the concert to begin and the façade of the building was illuminated using four OHPs.(This low-tech solution, as the photos above show, produced spectacular results, and is something that we will certainly copy sometime ourselves!) The first ‘movement’ of the performance began with the stars of ‘Out of Fashion?’ being escorted under white umbrellas into the auditorium. Once the audience was seated the ‘stars’ appeared back-lit as silhouettes on a screen made of a double thickness of bubble wrap (another most effective low-tech solution we will copy sometime!)Then, to music provided by DJ Megyeri, they emerged in groups from behind the screen, each girl holding up a large white card onto which Super 8 footage was projected. As a finale they brought all the cards together to form one large composite Super 8 projection screen.

The second ‘ movement’ of the performance featured the ‘Siphony Orchestra and the S8 Acrobat Group’.This was a most entertaining visual tribute to the famous Szeged product, the Soda Siphon, which had a very inventive ‘orchestral’ accompaniment of popping corks and hissing, gurgling and splashing sounds. To rapturous applause, the ‘orchestra’ came on stage from behind the screen carrying their ‘instruments’ – soda siphons and bottles.
‘As if We were There’, our live drawing performance over found Super8 footage, ended the programme. Although we had set up our video camera before the concert began, unfortunately we only managed to make a recording of the first part of the concert. In my next posting I will include this with the video clips from the second drawing performance that we gave the following evening in the Grand Café.

In August we were also busy preparing material for our visit to Hungary where we were to give some live Tagtool drawing performances over old found Super8 films during the Szeged Festival. These photos show Dima’s set up for capturing our chosen Super8 material.
Then we had some Tagtool drawing sessions in the studio using this material. We didn’t make a recording these but my cousin Alan Sander was visiting us and he took lots and lots of photos throughout! These little collages I have made up from a selection of his pictures.
So much for our preparations! I hope to do some postings of our performances at the Szeged 9th International Super8 mm Festival later this week.

August was a very busy month for us – lots of summer visitors, and partying and Tagtooling of course. Now it is catch up time! We had several really good jam sessions in the studio so Dima had an opportunity to play as well as attending to all the technical set up.These photos are from a session with Christian Reiner. Dima planned to record and video the whole thing but unfortunately some gremlin had switched off the sound (I promise it wasn’t me!) so it was fortunate that my cousin Alan, who is a keen photographer, was staying with us and took these photos (hence the superior quality!).

There were more music and Tagtool sessions when Andreas Dzialocha came from Berlin for the weekend and on the Friday evening Sergey and his family visited us so the studio session consisted of three musicians and an audience as well! Dima and Andreas spent the whole of Saturday in the studio and in the evening I joined them for a Tagtool jam session. This time Dima did make some successful sound recordings and also a video of my Tagtooling. Unfortunately he hasn’t had time to edit it so for now I can only post these photos that I took (some a bit out of focus, as usual!)

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.