Tagtool at Cafe Wendel, Berlin

The Berlin clubcafe Wendel hosts a Tagtool session once a month as part of their evening events programme and we were very pleased to be invited by Andreas Dzialocha to perform there. Wendel is a very nice venue – definitely worth checking out if you are in Berlin.As usual, setting up everything is Dima’s job so I had time to take a few photos before sitting down to draw. During the performance Dima took some video which I will put in my next posting but for the rest of the photos below I have to thank our friends Ernst Altmann and Markus Dorninger who came and kindly agreed to take photos for me.The three musicians – Edith Steyer, Manuel Miethe and Michael Esch.And, just for the record, a couple of shots of me and Dima ‘in action’!

Our Tagtool performance was a real jam session – although the three musicians knew each other and had played together on previous occasions they had no time to rehearse or to practise working with the drawn and video images before the performance began.There is no doubt that having live music and a receptive audience is definitely the best recipe for an enjoyable Tagtool performance!

For this posting I have chosen just a few images from the (literally) hundreds that Ernst took during the performance.

The photos above provide a much more vivid impression of my Tagtool drawing than they do of Dima’s underlying video but I think that the images below capture something of the interaction between the two mediums.Both the musical accompaniment and the length of this performance meant that I had an opportunity to exploit the full range of the mark-making possibilities of the Tagtool – and so it seemed appropriate that not all of my drawing was figurative. Below are two sets of stills from some of the more abstract sequences. I am certain that the stimulus provided both by the music and the video clips enabled me to produce a more interesting and wider range of images than would have been possible had I been drawing alone.To obtain a more complete view of the different ‘episodes’ in the drawing sessions I have arranged all of Ernst’s photos into 14 photo albums. Click here for the link.