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Yesterday people started to gather round our tent early, while it was still light and by the time that the performance began there was a big audience to see the first show.
Because I went with Ben to the reception at the Art Gallery I wasn’t able to take any photos of Luca’s calligraphy that opened the evening’s events, but there was a time lapse camera installed in the tower so I was able to watch a speeded up version at home later. It seemed like every other person in the audience was taking pictures and videos with a camera or mobile phone. When I wasn’t drawing during the artists’ jam session I took a lot of photos too, both of the tower and the audience. Here are a few.
Ben is keeping a special Wall of Light blog and a group photo album. You can find it here – www.wall-of-light.com.
The evening ended with a free session for the audience. It wasn’t difficult to persuade people to ‘have a go’ and soon there was a big queue of people of all ages eagerly waiting to have their opportunity to draw.
As you can see, the Tagtool found a lot of new friends!

Last night was Press night. We arrived early to get everything set up and ready for the arrival of the official photographers.An outdoor broadcast unit from BBC Look North parked up alongside our tent and by the time it was dark they were joined by several other groups of photographers, cameramen and interviewers all wanting to film, take photos and find out about the Tagtool. This photo shows Jörg Steffke who is documenting the whole of the Wall of Light projections for O.M.A. International.Everyone was captivated by Luca’s beautiful (and apparently effortless) calligraphy!The photo above shows the introductory drawing for the festival press night that he created with Maki and Iink. At times there were so many people gathered round them that they could hardly see the Multangular Tower and what they were drawing.

Once the press people had gone we did some more drawing together, just for fun and some of the people who had come to find out what was happening also ‘had a go’.

I think that the expressions on the faces of these three lads conveys much better than words what fun it is to draw with the Tagtool!

We arrived in York yesterday afternoon and were met at the station by Ben from GaiaNova (the London based events company who are providing the outdoor projection equipment for the Wall of Light performances ) and Josef from O.M.A. International (the Austrian developers of the Tagtool). We went straight to the Museum Gardens where the projector tower, looking like a very impressive oversized black bird hide, and a nice awning to protect us, the Tagtools and the rest of the equipment from the weather, were already in position. By the time it was dark all the equipment was connected up and we were ready to test it out.

Wow!! The super bright projector picked out every detail of the beautiful Roman brickwork of the Multangular Tower, making it an ideal canvas for Tagtooling. I began to draw with Maki.
This was our first equipment test – the colours were so bright and the scale of the projection so large! It was really exciting and, despite the rain, I felt I could go on drawing all night! We did another drawing together and everyone took lots of photos.
Then Luca Barcellona arrived and I handed my pen to him. (It is Luca’s beautiful calligraphy in the photo at the head of this post.)

There will be another opportunity to test the equipment this evening and I will try to do a posting every day during the festival. I will also make a big online photo album to document this event as well.

This is a photo of our new Tagtool-in-a-box. It is a family effort – Dima made the Tagtool and I designed and made the box!
This shows the box packed up and ready to put the lid on, with the gamepad, plugs and all the cables needed to connect it to the projector inside. The Tagtool section has slots on either side so that it can be positioned for right or left handed use and the drawing surface can also be lifted out and angled for drawing.

Now that I usually use my new Wacom drawing tablet and wide-screen laptop with my Tagtool Mini, Dima’s original idea was to use my old Intuos and laptop to make a D.I.Y.Cintiq which he would then build into a Tagtool all in one so that we could use the two together in some collaborative drawing sessions. Although I was really interested in the idea of having a D.I.Y. Cintiq to play with I was less happy about having it embedded in a Tagtool all in one (Dima is right handed but I draw with my left hand so would have to draw with my arms crossed if I wanted to use it!).

The initial stages of the ‘build’ could more accurately be described as ‘destruction’. First Dima took to pieces (literally) the laptop, then it was the turn of my old Wacom to have all its innards removed. As I have no technical know-how this looked all very alarming and I couldn’t imagine how the bits and pieces could possibly be put together again, let alone work! I took lots of photos of the various stages and have put them in an album so that anyone who is interested can view the whole process step by step.
Dima made a test of Tagtool drawing through the laptop screen by laying it over our new Intuos and as the picture below shows, this worked fine.
However, when he put the screen over the ‘sandwich’ of the innards of the old Wacom and laptop, some parts of the drawing area didn’t work so well. Rather than take everything to pieces again Dima decided to abandon the D.I.Y.Cintiq idea for this build. As by this time he had cut up the outside of the Wacom to make the box for the Tagtool, he put a piece of thin perspex over the drawing area of the Wacom instead. (This has been a great success, as the perspex gives a much enhanced sensitivity to the pressure of the pen – which I find really useful for drawing.)
I was absolutely delighted when the old Wacom, laptop, Tagtool and gamepad worked first time when Dima finally put them together. All that unscrewing and undoing of wires, pulling things apart, sawing bits off, repositioning and joining up had been a success!

Last Saturday we did another Tagtool performance at the final concert in the Stutterer Music Series organised by Bethany at the Brick Bar in Prague. Bethany (Beseppy) was playing with Martin Janíček in the final set of the evening. There was a ceiling mounted projector at the venue that we used last time but as our projector is much brighter we used it instead (mounted on a tower of beer crates!). This photo shows us testing the set up.

My video camera cannot cope with low light situations so Dima took stills with his digital SLR camera of the drawing at 11 second intervals. He used frame blending to achieve the morphing effect you can see in this video of the performance. Because this process speeds up the drawing the sound represents only a short sample of the whole performance.

We have just returned from a trip to Rotterdam – taking our Tagtool with us of course! Filmwerkplaats Rotterdam was where we made our first 16mm film together – there are great facilities for experimental filmmakers there and people are always friendly and very helpful. For this visit we decided that we would film in black and white on Super8 one of my monochrome Tagtool drawing sessions.


This is a photo of the drawing and recording set up. Because of the low light in the attic we had to use a Nizo 481 Macro Super8 camera. Dima made the wooden box to contain our projector and mounted it on a second tripod to illuminate my drawing area – a ‘stage’ where the curved surface of a huge cylindrical water tank formed the backdrop while a big wooden door and one of the beams supporting the roof formed the wings. In front of the door was an old car seat. A solitary ‘actor’ (Dima!) appears and disappears in the course of the drawing process.

We developed the Super8 film at the Filmwerkplaats and on our return home Dima did this home-made telecine transfer of the filmed footage. This process unfortunately loses the very special quality that celluloid gives to the images and, being a DIY job, it is a bit shaky and uneven but I think it gives quite a good impression of the session none the less. I am posting this version now but we plan to do optical printing on 16mm film and add a specially composed soundtrack.
The music that we chose to accompany this version is The Alban Berg Quartet’s recording of Berg’s String Quartet, op. 3.

A couple of weeks ago we had a visit from Maki and the crew from Tulln in Austria, the developers of the Tagtool.  They arrived on the Friday evening when we had a barbecue (with lots of beer and calvados) so the Tagtool sessions began on the Saturday and continued on Sunday morning.  Maki had brought his Tagtool mini with him so the set up enabled us to have two people drawing and animating together – which was great fun.  They also took video and still photos to document the weekend’s events and for some of the sessions Jan and Dima provided guitar and drums accompaniment.

I did two drawing sessions on the Saturday with Maki.  I found this an extremely interesting and stimulating experience and I think that working in this way caused me to think even more concentratedly than when I draw alone.  In the evening our Australian friend Peter and his wife joined the company and we had an open session when everyone joined in.  On Sunday morning Maki and I did another session together – drawing for about 40 minutes without a break – quite a marathon!

This video clip, and the one that follows, were both made from our sessions on the Saturday. Dima has speeded up our drawing to fit the length of the two songs. I was quite pleased with the results of this process although I think I would have preferred the first video to be played at a rather slower speed than it appears here. While I usually quite enjoy watching the drawing process played faster than normal, when the animation is speeded also, sometimes it becomes too busy for my eyes.

During the weekend when Dima and Jan weren’t improvising for us we worked to a selection of our favourite CDs, including Laibach, Tom Waites, Coolhaven and Yma Sumac.  However, Dima added a different soundtrack to the videos  – this was not the music that we used to accompany our drawing.  The two tracks he has used are ‘Stay the Same’ and ‘Seventh Day’ from the CD ‘Voices of Eden’ by the Swedish group Flesk Quartet.

Recently we were invited by our friend Anja to accompany her performance at the Stutterer Music Series (www.stutterermusic.com) in Prague. There was very little time for us to prepare and Anja wasn’t familiar with the venue so we packed up the Tagtool and arrived early to set up all the equipment and have a quick practice session before the performance. Though we could have used the white screen on the stage we decided that we would project directly on the brick wall – as it turned out a really good decision because I had a larger area to work on and the drawing had an interesting texture. Anja describes her music as ‘slow groove electronic improvisation’ (Hear samples of her work at www.myspace.com/akitay). I drew and Dima did the animation – an improvisation consisting of mostly abstract shapes and geometric patterns.

As usual, setting up the Tagtool created quite a lot of interest and Trever Hagen, who was playing the second set of the evening, asked if we would be willing to do some visuals for him too. Although we only had a few minutes to listen to his pre-performance warm up we decided that as an accompaniment to his live looping electronic trumpet compositions I would do some figurative drawing. Trever’s compositions can be heard at www.myspace.com/trevonic and here are some stills of the drawings I did at his Brick Bar performance.

We didn’t take our video with us so it is only thanks to Trever’s friend who was busy with her camera that we have these stills of what was, for us at least, a very enjoyable evening.

Trever is returning to Prague next month so we are hoping to have another opportunity to work with him then.
So, the moral of this story is that not only is Tagtooling great fun – it also helps you make new friends!

Here is a first sketch of an idea that I did to accompany Dima’s latest composition. Both my drawing and Dima’s playing have a lot of mistakes but I thought I’d post the video anyway and if we do a better version in the future it will be possible to compare them.

I thought the beginning of the clip was working OK but then I got a bit lost when I started to draw the full face heads in the middle section. We do everything in one ‘take’, so this means that I can’t just cut out the sections I’m not pleased with and substitute something else – quite a good discipline for me or I would be for ever chopping and changing things, hoping for a better end result!

I realise that I usually draw with the transparency slider set to opaque so I thought I’d do a few experiments varying this setting. At first I worked with the background dark.

But then I decided to cover the whole drawing area with opaque white and use this as a background to draw on, using black in varying degrees of opacity. This little clip shows the various stages in the drawing process.
I used limited colour in the next clip, again drawing over an opaque white background. Then I used the fade slider to successively ‘erase’ the completed drawing and reversed the order of the photos to make the final image magically ‘appear’.