4shrooms

The 4shrooms4u project has reached a mid-way point in its evolution, and a progress report is called for!

We have created 7 clips of our analogue practices. Each clip was produced with one of the shroomies as the actor/artist, and others in supporting roles. Each presents a particular technique in projection art which can be hopefully easily absorbed and advanced by the budding shroomita.

Technical details: most clips were captured with the Panasonic NV-DX1 or the Sony DCR-VX1000E.  They were shot in a 60 minutes session at Studio HollerG, and then cut them using FinalCutPro.  Pablo cutter for all.  Camera was by Pablo Naranjo, Georg and Doris. Backing soundtracks by Georg Hofman, Hermann Bühler and Doris.

In addition to this, we’ve created a single, longer presentation in video form of one performance, expressing the combination of many artists and many techniques in an unusual setting. This is by way of bringing all the elements together for the 4shrooms4u audience, and presenting a challenging target.  The performance was done at night, outside in the ampitheatre at Symposion Lindabrunn, a quarry / sculpturing retreat south of Vienna.

Work so far done was achieved primarily with funding from NetzNetz/MA7-Stadt Wien, the self-contributions of our shroomie artists, and some equipment from CastYourArt.

The next step is to take each of these clips and wrap them into a presentation layer using standard net techniques: website and DVD. Each clip deserves one page, with text of explanation and artistic merit, accompanied by technical instructions. The pages need to be collected into a cohesive system, for which we have created a new blog called 4shrooms4u.  That blog is the first attempt, as it easily lays out a page-by-page collection, and allows basic formatting and presentation.  Our current task is how to embed the video into the blog posting.  So far, it looks like all the plugins only support google or youtube video.

andi on oils, oils on tent

back from Symposion Lindabrunn and our first cut of Lux Ludica.  I’m attempting to upload some imagery, but failing dismally, it seems that TCP of greater that 80k is now banned across the english channel. Fixed, the problem was closer to me than I thought… now uploaded in large format only.  (I still have no way to create small images from the big ones.)

The story was that we converged — almost all the 4shroomies and some friends, extras and cameras — on Symposion Lindabrunn to try out our ideas for a weekend “event”.  Now that we have proven the basic idea, the work begins on making it somewhat more serious … next year!

Luckily we got some support from Angewandte who purchased a huge tent for such productions.  This arrived the day before us, so we got to put it up in its virginal near-white state.  As it was some 10m x 5m, it took up almost all of the floor space in the ampitheatro!  From the outside, it made for a very nice screen, and the inside was just too chill-out for words.

Also, we included a couple of friends, Dominic and his mate (name?) who brought along 25 slide projectors :-~ We like enthusiasm, but that’s a first!  It also caused lots of scrurrying around for extra power.  Luckily again, the Lindabrunn place has scads of power:  3 x 3 phase circuits, and we used them all.

crystal, colours, trick lens and lazy susan!

Which makes for a new record for 4shrooms:  4×16mm, 4xOHP, 5xDias and with the 15 of Dominic, we are up to 28 projectors.  A tough challenge.

Shroomies, get your photos up there…. Mine were not that grand as I was doing other things.

Thanks to Gurter, Johana, Kurt for hosting us.  Thanks to Pablo and Matthias for video support!  Next year, with a vengeance!

More projections than Sigmund Freud’s waiting room! We had a lucky 13 beams in all, across both sides of the Radowan hall in Yppenplatz. Including our new, tiny €1 two-slide antique.

Soho also saw for the first time ever all 8 shroomies on performance, and for the second night, we welcomed as special guest artist Marc a.k.a Deep Fjord.

Veteran shroomie Ruth now goes on sabbatical to a Peruvian alpine village to contemplate how the Austrians projected their spoor across the planet. She will be back at the end of the year, hopefully, elsewise we have to mount a rescue operation.

Call to all shroomies, do we have photos of LifeBall?

Rumours that we made the national news are still unconfirmed, but as one wit observed, a 30 second spot still leaves us 14 and a half minutes of fame in the bank account.

Notable highlights: a wonderful stage put us in a commanding position, and our two beamers saved the show. Our longest performance ever! Projectors were on by 21:00 and the last one was turned off on the dot at 05:00 … We cleared the building in 30 minutes, and were home and cracking the vodka by 06:00.

A good performance at the re.sonance closing night!

For some reason that cannot be explained by fun visuals, loyal crowd and jam-sandwich sound, the performance upstairs at the ragnarhof drew most of the crowd upstairs! Okeydokey, wasn’t our fault guys, perhaps matthias’s bass boxes just weren’t big enough

The show had some flaws… layout of the equipment meant that the crowd weren’t drawn to the front. We started somewhat chaotically, and never quite built up a climax.

On the other hand, it ran on for 3 hours and nobody complained…. For ambience, it rated 5 exploding stars. Nice one, and it gives food for thought as we rush into the traditional dieting season known as xmas.