Drawinglive News

‘Světlo v ulicích’ is the title of Písek’s festival of light and we were invited to do live Tagtool drawing on the courthouse building (below) in the main square.
Above – Dima preparing cameras and the Tagtool while the Lunchmeat crew set up the sound system and mount the projector on top of the van for the performance, which was scheduled to begin at 7 pm. The event was very well organised with part of the car-park already cordoned off for us when we arrived.So many people arrived early when we were testing the equipment that I had to do the drawings above to announce the start time of the performance. By 7 pm the whole square was full of people and there were big crowds standing in the street leading to it as well – I think it is perhaps the largest audience I have ever seen for an outdoor Tagtool performance!(The organisers estimated that there were about 2000 people but because I was busy drawing and everyone watching was behind me, I was hardly aware of the audience!) Here are some photos that Dima took of my drawings.

As well as taking the photos above, Dima made two videos of the performance, an ‘arty’ one using his home-made circular capture camera rig that shows both the projection and whole of the square, and a ‘straight’ one using his Panasonic GH2 camera showing my Tagtool drawing on the courthouse building.

So – big thanks to Lunchmeat for organising this really great performance opportunity for us and also to the crew for driving us to and from the event and ensuring that everything went so smoothly!

Lunchmeat‘s club NEONE was the venue for the Transformania Festival this year – which proved to be a really good location for night that was packed with music, performances, projections and a lot of good old-fashioned partying! With performances from our musician and artist friends from Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and Rotterdam as well as friends from Prague – it was a very big programme, beginning at 7 pm and continuing until the early hours…
Of course the party would not have been complete without some Tagtooling – both old-school and Tagtool for iPad. Below – here I am drawing with Maki, using our iPads to provide the visuals for the Austrian band, Her Mit Der Frucht!
Later in the evening I used my old Tagtool all-in-one. In this photo Schmacke and Olivia are preparing for their Fakemasters and Fakemistress performance.I don’t have any photos for the blog of the performance itself – which is a pity… But later in the evening Dima did take some photos showing the Tagtool drawing I did to accompany the set with K.U.N.T.Z. and friends. Here is a selection.
Above – Jan and David began the set with ‘The Cat’ from their song cycle ‘Hexentiere’ and then they led a jam session with everyone joining in the fun.





During the evening I was too busy either drawing or partying to take photos of all the performances but this posting on the blog is an opportunity for me to say a big ‘thank you!’ to everyone who worked so hard to make this year’s Transformania Festival such a very enjoyable event.

This was the first public outing for Dima’s new controller and software for stereoscopic 3D drawing, with a performance on the street organised by our friends from Lunchmeat as part of the Prague Signals Festival. We prepared the 3D sequence for the occasion beforehand but we also set up the oldschool Tagtool to announce the event and do some freestyle 2D drawing as well.Below – Lunchmeat’s big 10000 lumens projector on the roof of our van….…and this is Forma busy setting up their music equipment.The office building we had chosen for the projection was closed for the evening but official permission had not been given for the event to take place so it was not possible to ask for the lights to be put out (which did happen, but only halfway through the performance, spoiling somewhat the 3D effect in the first drawing sequence). We also had to delay the start of the performance until the 3D glasses for the audience arrived but despite these problems the event attracted a large number of people (and fortunately no policemen!)
The 3D part of the performance was entitled, ‘Dreamscape in three Movements’ – Childhood Idyll, Urban Nightmare and Apocalyptic Dream.


The full moon added an extra touch of drama to the urban nightmare!


After the performance people took off their 3D glasses but the crowds didn’t disperse so while Forma continued to play I started to draw again, this time in 2D, and had fun doing some oldschool Tagtooling.

I have to thank our friend Joost van Veen for taking some iPhone photos at the event – as usual most of mine were not very good! But if you have blue/cyan glasses you can now view in 3D our videos of ‘Dreamscape in three Movements’.

And lastly – a very big thank you to our friends from Lunchmeat for once again arranging everything for us and ensuring that the performance was a success! Also – they have published a very nice set of photos documenting the event – press here for the link.
Now we are looking forward to further collaborations with Forma – and more 3D performances in the future……

The location for this performance on Saturday 5 October was the building of the former Fezka Textile Works in Strakonice – a very large and impressive industrial complex, now closed, in the centre of this town in the south of the Czech Republic. Because this was such a very large building we used two projectors, the smaller and brighter one projecting on the gatehouse of the factory and the big short throw projector, which gives a less bright image, covering the rest of the building. (Although the photo below that I took with my little camera does slightly exaggerate this difference in brightness.)Local DJ DxTech909 supplied the sound for the performance – which was really great….….and a lot of people came to see the show.Our Tagtool performance acted as an introduction to the town’s ‘Day of Architecture’ events on Sunday, which unfortunately we could not stay to see – but thanks to Martin who organised everything for us we had a most enjoyable, although far too short, visit to Strakonice!
To end this post – a few more of Dima’s photos from the performance….

The festival took place around this old derelict industrial site at Libušín důl.A lot of hard work had gone into clearing the site and erecting the various tents and stages for the festival. We were projecting on the exterior of the big building in the photo above – which proved to be a great location for Tagtooling!The side of the building was really dark with a good clear view for drawing.Our BenQ wide throw projector covered nearly the whole height of the building. It is only 3500 lumens but in these dark conditions it was possible to get quite bright images although, because as can be seen in the photo above, some of the colours were a bit dull, I drew mostly in black and white.



Because I was drawing from 9 pm and people were coming and going throughout the night visiting the various festival performance sites, I was able to take my time and develop several different sequences of drawings.


As usual Dima took lots of photos – here is a selection.




During the night I took some short breaks and was able to have a quick look at the other stages and projections – the festival had a really great atmosphere, with a lot of different things to see, live bands, VJing, art installations and fire jugglers….. Then it was back to the Tagtool for me, to do some more drawing….

For this short video Dima selected part of the performance we gave on Thursday 29 August, projecting on the old armoury building in České Budějovice.

Of course in the video my drawing is speeded up a lot – there is no way that I could draw so quickly in ‘real time’! But doing this at least gives some sense of the succession of images and the development of the drawing. As the photo in my previous posting shows, this was a really great building for Tagtool projection and having the use of Lunchmeat’s 10,000 lumen wide throw projector gave wonderful super-bright images. (Thank you Lunchmeat!)

The accompanying music is ‘Parallel Highway’ by the band God is an Astronaut from Glen of the Downs, Ireland.

The white painted exterior of the old town armoury with its small windows and crow-step gable proved to be a most interesting ‘canvas’ for Tagtool drawing and with the wide throw of the 10,000 lumens (very big and expensive!) projector provided by Lunchmeat it was possible to cover the whole of the building with wonderfully vibrant colour even before it became dark.For the spectators standing in the square in front of the building there was a completely unobstructed view of the projections – and also for me at my Tagtool workstation. The weather was dry and warm – in short, the ideal conditions for an outdoor Tagtool performance!
Here are more photos of some of the drawing sequences (easy to spot the ones that were taken by Dima – they’re all in focus and better quality than mine!)
With this very powerful 10,000 lumen projector it was possible to get some really strong yellows and ochres (which was really great, as bright yellows like this are just not possible with the equipment we have at home!)
For my next posting I will have some video, but in the meantime – once more a big ‘thank you’ to Lunchmeat for arranging this great Tagtooling opportunity for us and also to the sponsors of this event in České Budějovice, Jihočeská televize and Budweiser Budvar.

Today we are in České Budějovice in the south of the Czech Republic to make a live outdoor drawing performance as part of the town’s visual arts festival.We will be projecting on to this beautiful 14th Century building and for this performance I will be using my ‘old-school’ Tagtool. So this seems like a good time to explain why for this particular performance I have chosen to use my very large, heavy and cumbersome old D.I.Y. Tagtool all-in-one instead of the neat, light and portable iPad on which I have the Tagtool for iPad app.

Recently Tagtooler Benjamin Rabe posted this comment about the iPad app. on the Tagtool facebook page, ‘The way you interact with Tagtool (to me) is essentially different to all other painting apps out there. It doesn’t emulate any pick-a-brush and dip-it-into-color behaviour. It doesn’t resemble matter-based creation at all….’
I agree that this is indeed the very special thing about the Tagtool for iPad app.- and it is this same characteristic of the ‘old-school’ Tagtool that makes for a very special drawing experience too! However, there are some differences (other than size and convenience) between the two Tagtools that I would like to write about now.

Here is a photo of a multiplayer session that Maki and I did recently at a barbecue in the yard of Gerard’s studio. For this event the iPad was the obvious choice, and not just because it was so easy to carry to the location and quick to set up!As the collage of photos above shows, what we produced was in effect an animated mural, which also incorporated the shadows of objects and plants in the yard and the people at the barbecue into the visual mix. And although people at the barbecue were able to see our drawing and animation as the work progressed, rather it was this animated mural, the ‘end product’ rather than the process of making the drawing and the animation, that was the real focus of the session – the creation of a temporary animated mural to act as an ever moving backdrop to the evening’s entertainment.
Working collaboratively like this using the iPad app. is really magic! The process of looking down at the little image on your iPad and then seeing it projected so large on the wall, the (really great) feature of being able to ‘home in’ on this image to draw in detail and sharing your drawing with other players in the session, the possibility of multi-touch drawing using all your fingers, the ‘pinching and spreading’ movements to control colour, line size etc. and the exciting animation features – all these things make drawing with the Tagtool for iPad a very special experience – just as Benjamin Rabe says. Certainly, animation using the ‘old-school’ Tagtool (which really needs two people to operate properly, one drawing and the other animating with the gamepad) is quite primitive in comparison, so for visual storytelling and animated mural painting the Tagtool for iPad wins hands down!
However, despite being so cumbersome, heavy and awkward to transport I still love my ‘old-school’ D.I.Y. Tagtool all-in-one dearly and I don’t consider it to be just a big old dinosaur, fit only to be consigned to our heap of dead electronics in the basement……
Here’s why – the ‘old-school’ Tagtool has some really vital characteristics when used for drawing as a live performance art form. In this kind of performance (especially when accompanied by live improvised music) both the process and the progress of making the projected drawing visible in real time for the audience becomes as important or indeed, more important, than producing a ‘finished’ piece of artwork. (And in this kind of live performance drawing I rarely use any animation). For me, the most important thing then becomes the actual physical act of ‘drawing blind’ with the stylus on the pressure sensitive surface of the drawing tablet while directing the focus of my attention instead onto the projected image. (I find that I need only very occasionally to glance down at the Tagtool sliders to adjust colour, opacity etc.). As well as being able to release, instantly ‘kill’ an image and draw something new or to draw a new image over an existing one, with the ‘old-school’ Tagtool it is possible to release a drawing in progress, partially fade it, then continue to draw into the remaining ghostly image – or to draw over an existing image then use the fade slider to make the underlying drawing miraculously ‘reappear’ – some really great features of the ‘old-school’ Tagtool in a live drawing performance!

In conclusion – I think that both the Tagtool for iPad and the ‘old-school’ D.I.Y. Tagtool are really wonderful inventions that together have opened up a whole new world of drawing experiences – so do seek out an opportunity to try out both of them, if you are reading this and haven’t already joined the growing band of ‘Tagtoolistas’ worldwide!

This little video is from a performance given on our arrival in Izola, when I made a sequence of Tagtool drawings on the wall of the church in Manzioli Piazza to accompany the open air concert by Kate Young which was held in the square.

Unfortunately something went wrong with the camera Dima was using and initially he thought we had no record at all of this concert. However, somehow he managed to salvage these fragments and put together this speeded-up version of some of my drawings. This means of course, that the song and the images don’t fit together – for instance, the last sequence shows flowers and leaves, and, if you look carefully, some caterpillars eating the leaves (which was the subject of another song in the programme). Before the concert we had no time to discuss what I should draw so I had to rely on Kate’s introduction to each of her songs to make suitable accompanying images – quite a challenge!

To end this post here are some photos kindly sent to me by Joachim Gross.Above, two nice photos of the musicians and the audience and in the pictures below, one of the younger members of the audience doing some drawing – as usual the children all wanted to ‘have a go’ with the Tagtool after the concert!

Here is Dima’s video showing K.U.N.T.Z. performance at Festival HISTeRIA.

The animal song featured in this video is The Donkey, with vocals provided by David and Jan on drums. The dance improvisation of the donkeys and the wolf is by members of the festival Butoh dance group. In the background of the video you can see part of my Tagtool drawings and Dima’s visuals are derived from the hundreds of still photos that Damian made during the performance.

The donkey song lasts for 6 minutes so – sit back, turn up the volume and enjoy!