About OMAi
Established in 2007 in Vienna, OMAi is a media art collective specialising in digital live drawing and animation. We develop the Tagtool app and realise artistic projects in public spaces, museums, theatres and music venues.
Office for Media and Arts International GmbH
Founded by Josef Dorninger, Markus Dorninger and Matthias Fritz (also known as Gnu, Maki and iink), OMAi has realised countless successful projects, shows and installations. With a strong focus on projection painting, our team has gained extensive experience in interactive stage design and implemented several immersive installation experiences across Europe, Asia and the US. Besides our work in top art and music establishments, we apply digital art as a strategy for community engagement through workshops and public events. OMAi develops Tagtool, a versatile digital tool designed for live painting and animation, serving visual artists, creators, and educators worldwide.
A brief history of OMAi
The beginnings
In the early 2000s, a house on the banks of the Danube River near Vienna became a local creative hotspot. Brothers Markus and Josef Dorninger, along with their childhood friend Matthias Fritz, began collaborating with musicians, VJs, and street artists. They experimented with live painting, animation, and digital projection in public spaces.
DIY Tagtool
Tagtool was born in the course of a theatre production, as a physical DIY machine for live painting and animation. It came in many shapes and forms, most commonly a wooden box featuring a tablet, some sliders and a videogame controller. The idea spread around the internet after the crew made the building instructions available online. Soon home-made Tagtools appeared in all corners of the world. OMAi was founded in 2007 to support development of Tagtool and the growing number of the team's international engagements.
Tagtool for iPad
In 2012, Tagtool was brought to the iPad and became a multitouch and multiplayer instrument. The project won multiple awards, and was featured twice in official Apple videos presented at the World Wide Developer Conference keynote. The underlying invention of a "system for facilitating collaborative visual expression on a portable computing device" was successfully filed as a patent in the USA.
