The Shift-Time Blogging Project

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!

Martin Smith has been in Holland witnesing the testing of Umerus before Theo Jansen brings it to Shrewsbury next week. He’s writing up his experiences on his blog but here are some of the first shots he sent from his phone:

Check in here for more

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!

Searching around for videos of Theo Jansen talking about his Strandbeests (his new one, Umerus, will be in the Quarry Park from July 2nd - 12th) I stumbled upon a glut of videos of Lego Strandbeests, made by people inspired by his work to test his theories in plastic brick form.

Here’s a rather creepy eight legged spider:

and here’s a detailed analysis of the walking technique from the University of Alberta:

Both of those are battery powered which goes against one of the principles of Jansen’s work - that the creatures should be autonomous and powered by the elements. Here’s an attempt at a wind-powered Legobeest:

But it seems electricity is the way forward if you really want to explore the engineering of the things. Check out the speed of this beastie:

I believe these are built using the Lego Mindstorms system and there are a few projects on the lego.com site. Here’s one for an “Animalis Hexapod”.