The Shift-Time Blogging Project

From the blogs over the last week:

Monday

Martin is in a “reflective mood” after the debates on Sunday.

Sue Tortoise rounds up her experiences over the weekend with thoughts on Blue Eyed Soul’s TAKE, Umerus, Shift-Life and the speakers at Blast Off.

Sam Moore posts a couple of photos from the Shift-Life project she did the character designs for.

Steve Green recounts his weekend taking photographs around the park which you’ll find in this set.

Blue Eyed Soul thank the photographers who recorded TAKE on Saturday.

Lorna interviews Moya about Blue Eyed Soul for Virtual Shropshire:

Wednesday

Gekko reviews TAKE with photos.

Martin visits ELF at the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery and finds “not a glimmer of life”.

Gekko announces she’s started a blog for the sheep that participated in Feng-Ru Lee’s performance: Marmont Jacobs, Montgomery, Wales.

Umerus moved to St Mary’s Church drawing much attention and Martin followed its journey with his video camera.

Pride Hill from Martin Smith on Vimeo.

And here it is in the Church:

Thursday

Sue interviews the creators of In Praise of Darwin’s Mistakes, the first part of The Weather Man trilogy.

Friday

Martin is still thinking about Kevin Warwick’s talk on Sunday about upgrading his body. He needs more RAM.

Jess from Blue Eyed Soul reflects on their performance of TAKE with some “backstage” photos.

Saturday

Gekko reviews Opera North’s The Weatherman and other events and pronounces it “an amazing day”.

Sunday

Sue writes with great detail about the science and philosophy underlying Theo Jansen’s work. Recommended reading.

Monday

Gekko reviews Heresy the installation by Andy McKeown and Sue Challis.

Finally…

Sue notices the sparcity of posts on this blog over the week and asks what’s going on with this project. I’ll try and answer that in the next post…

An ongoing collection of stuff found online about Shift-Time over the weekend. This is from quick scans of people I’m already monitoring or that come up in searches for “shifttime”. I’ll be doing deeper searches over the next fortnight.

Steve Green did a lovely photoshoot of Theo Jansen last week

Blue Eyed Soul are getting ready and welcome feedback through Moya’s Twitter account.

Danny, aka Flickering Velvet, has posted some photos to Flickr.

Sue Tortoise has a great set of closeup photos of Umerus

Sue checks out ELF: Electronic Life Forms.

I’ve been wielding my Through the Viewfinder camera around the site.

Blue Eyed Soul thought my photos were rather nice. (Hey, I’m just reporting what I find!)

Lorna reports on the launch night with Paul Granjon

Martin Smith is doing daily blog posts. Friday is nice with the setup but Saturday is where the meat happens.

Lovely photo of TAKE from Gekko:

And Sue has a great set of sepia-treated photos of the dance event.

As has Martin, although his as in colour.

Trisha, aka Gekkko, has been blogging up a storm over the last few days with a great mix of words and photos which are also on her Flickr. Here’s some of her recent posts:

She had a chat with Clinton Chaloner about his Primordial Soup exhibit:

Preferring to work and exhibit outdoors, Clinton enjoys evolving his pieces in situ over time. He enjoys this chance to build up meaningful relationships and strike up conversations with people who are perhaps quieter (than this blogger, certainly). No stranger to The Quarry where he made one of a series of dug-out canoes around four years ago, he has enjoyed catching up with previous acquaintances. In an electronic world, it makes you think hard about the frenetic and often sound-byte sized nature of our modern lives.

spent time with performance artist Feng Ru who will be mimicking a sheep…

Having talked to Feng-Ru’s experienced technician David Thomas, we had allayed our minor concerns over the performance pens, this being a very different event to what the sheep are used to at agricultural shows. We discussed our worry over having Theo Jansen’s amazing strandbeest Umerus as our neighbour for the weekend, that the rustling noises and movement would perturb the sheep from the as-normal-as-possible sheep actions that Milee will mimic (for up to three hours!) and that, realistically, if both performances were simultaneous that concentration would be hard for observers. I’m sure a solution will be found: fortunately the venue is a good size.

and witnessed the arrival of Theo Jansen and Umerus…

I spoke at length to the technicians accompanying Jansen who were deftly repairing minor disconnections and damage to the five part structure which had occurred as it was removed from the beach.

The adaptability of the plastic electric conduit used for the structure to bending, stretching, flattening and even to being tied in knots was surprising. It is believed that the product has around a ten year life in UV light, and Jansen is adept at reusing and recycling materials from previous animalis models.

Excellent stuff!

Shropshire-based artist Martin Smith is in Holland meeting Theo Jansen prior to him coming to Shrewsbury to build Umerus next Thursday. He’s blogging his progress and experimenting with livblogging from from the beach. I’ve embedded the live blog below - scroll down for the most recent entries. If you have a question for Theo stick it in the box at the bottom!

Steve Green went along to Belvedere School to have a look at the preparations for Naturebots. He’s written quite extensively, took a bunch of photos and posted the video they gave him to YouTube:

I was on the phone today to my new best buddy Dick Strawbridge of ‘Its’ Not Easy Being Green’ fame. He’s speaking in Shrewsbury on Sunday night as part of the Darwin Science & Adventure Lecture series. His talk is all about the Evolution of Engineering so I mentioned Quantum Leap, our own engineering miracle that’s taking shape on the banks of the River Severn opposite Shrewsbury Theatre Severn where his lecture is being staged. Check out the cage that’s been constructed to support the structure whilst it’s being built. It looks seriously industrial but the arch itself will be surprisingly elegant once it’s finished.

The design is inspiring but it’s also the kind of engineering challenge Dick would appreciate. There have been moments of serious head-scratching I can tell you but it’s coming together and I’m very excited.

Sam Moore’s Eyeful of Sound blog documents the development of her animated documentary about audio-visual synaesthesia which as well as promoting her work has helped her get in touch with synesthetes from around the world. It’s a nice example of talking about your work online can help develop the work itself.

She’s also involved in Shift-Life which will be on display in the Quarry Park over the weekend of July 4-5th and has shared one of the beasties on her blog:

Awwww…

We ran the first session at The Hive last week. The next one is tomorrow (Tuesday) at 6pm with another on the 16th and all are welcome.

Here’s some of the blog posts that were posts that were written after the event:

Shift Time…..Where it all starts - Photographer Steve Green who’s very active on the Shropshire Flickr Community writes his first ever blog post:

I have had an on line presence for a good while now, being a regular contributor to various forums, having my own Flickr account and more recently participating in the joys of both Facebook and Twitter. Flickr has been the most valuable to me and through it I have made some good friends who share the common interest of photography (and real ale, but that is a happy accident). I have seen various blogs in the past and know people who use them but they have never really inspired much interest, to me it seemed like a lot of bother to constantly update and diarise my life which I think that other people really wouldn’t be interested in, that was until yesterday.

After listening to Pete Ashton talk about his and various others blogs I realised that there is actually a lot of value in publishing regularly to a personal blog, particularly if you include lots of links to other peoples activities, and that there is a big opportunity being provided by the Arts Council who are funding this part of the Shift Time festival, so thanks to them for that!

Aw, shucks. Thanks Steve.

Martin Smith has been blogging on the Shropshire Visual Arts blog and asks “Does the fact that some people are asked to blog about something, stop an arts project being landed on an unsuspecting public?” That one of the reasons for doing this, although how effective that’ll be with this particular festival I wouldn’t like to say. Hopefully by setting a precedent with this sort of outreach program (for want of a better term) there’ll be more consultation and engagement in the future. We’ll see. He also shared the video of Theo Jansen’s TED talk on the site.

Sue Jones has started a brand new blog on discovering that her old website will be closed down by Geocities later this year and has posted Like The Weather about Opera North’s The Weather Man taking place at Theatre Severn on July 11th which “explores the relationship between FitzRoy and Darwin on the Beagle” with a review of This Thing of Darkness, a book about Admiral FitzRoy.

Those are blog posts specifically related to Shift-Time and this blogging project but it’s great to see they’re also blogging about other things. Lorna Rutter has been very prolific since starting her blog. Nothing about the festival yet but that’s fine. She’s obviously got plenty to write about already.

To check out the blogs of people involved in this project (and remember, it’s incredibly easy to get involved - you just have to start a blog or something similar) check the links on the right hand site of this site.