4shrooms

We have now purchased a number of slide projectors and lenses.

One projector is a Kodak Carousel to play around with and get experience.  We are more or less agreed that we will stick to Kodak Carousel types for the future, because they are heavy, high quality, as bright as it gets for slides, cheap, and getting cheaper.  We have now tried the one we purchased in real life at Meran in Italy and discovered that it still isn’t bright enough to compete with the overhead projectors.

To deal with that, two strategies:  firstly, we’ve purchased some really bright lens in the USA with bright optics:  35mm f2.5 (1st image), 220mm f2.5 (2nd).  Also, for fun, we just had to buy a really huge zoom lens: 190-330mm f3.9 (3rd).  This entire haul of lenses cost us a total of $64, which is mostly made of shipping costs in the USA. This is great buying, getting them through stores would cost us over $1000!  I’ll pick them up in November.

Secondly, we are going to look for some cheap Ektapros.  These are the professional version of the retail Carousel.  They have 1300 lumens rather than the 1000 of the Carousel.  Unfortunately, while they are expensive and valued in Europe, the US voltage ones are giveaways in the USA.  (Indeed, the 220mm lens to right came with a professional, 1300 lumens projector that only takes 110v )

If that doesn’t work, we should try the 6×6 slide projectors to see if they are brighter.  We also purchased a long lens that is compatible with the other, smaller non-Kodak projectors: 200mm, f3.5 (not shown), for playing around.  It was around 10 euros including shipping.

Doris + Jan return from Meran, Italy, where we performed a sort of mini-shrooms (2shrooms?) show in support of the various other artists.

This included 2 technical workshops on PureData, a program for driving electronic music and visuals, etc. We had to be very careful because our analogue visuals easily dominated and destroyed the delicate digital fabrics.  See left.  Also, support for acoustical musicians and a drum/percussion group called LoA.

Koloman was the documentor for the event, and took lots of video of the 4shrooms visuals.  He has offered to do a clip, but we have to provide some soundtrack:  Watch this space for a call for the musical 4shroomies to get together and jam.

The trip there was funded by the new Verein running the space!  They paid for a bus to transport a group of Vienna artists for the week.  They also paid for a fantastic stage-roof that could be raised and lowered on demand.  Very high-tech, and incongruent amongst the other handmade projects.