This projection was part of five days of events, organised by the fortnightly cultural newspaper A2, which aimed to bring to public notice the condition of some of the historic and architecturally significant buildings in Prague that have for years lain unoccupied, abandoned and decaying.
Below is Dima’s video of our projection from Wednesday 3 May on the façade of this unoccupied building opposite the National Gallery’s Veletržní palác.
[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/41512730]
The video compresses into four and a half minutes the whole of our twenty minute performance and, in a departure from our usual live Tagtool drawing, it was pre-prepared complete with soundtrack in the studio, then projected on site. We decided to try out this way of working because we felt that, with my style of drawing, it would have been very difficult for me to achieve live a ‘finished’ piece on so large a surface in such a short period of time.
We visited the site beforehand and I took this photo from which Dima made an underlying image for me to ‘draw over’ in the studio. Then I built up my drawing bit by bit, with Dima capturing and combining the different parts of the images in the computer. (In my opinion this capturing and combining is the really clever part of the process and one that is a complete mystery to me!) This way I could work without any time constraint and (as in my drawing for our 3D experiment) in the projection of the trees growing up and gradually engulfing the building I was in effect, ‘drawing with myself’. While this method of working definitely provided a solution to the problem of building up a complex and detailed sequence of images within a short time frame, it of course also removed the possibility of spontaneously responding to the particular ambient light conditions at the time of the performance (and also in this case taking into account the brightness of the projectors, as we were not working with our own equipment).
But it is certainly a method of working that we plan to develop in the future – now all we have to do is to keep a look-out for some promising locations……
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