Alongside the main Shift-Time Festival we're running a project to get Shrewsbury and the surrounding area blogging. We want people to use the festival to experiment with all sorts of "social media" services be they weblogs, photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube or Twitter. The end result, we hope, is to give Shrewsbury the tools to talk to itself about things that matter, whatever they may be.

This blog will act as a hub, collecting and linking to online activity that is either relevant to the festival or Shrewsbury in general, and posting things to to help and inspire you to blog about Shift-Time.

So get involved by setting up a blog or sharing your photos and videos online and let us know what you're up to so we can mention it on the blog.

Gekkko’s reportage

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…

feng-ru-friendsHaving 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.

Umerus_1%20on%20Flickr%20-%20Photo%20Sharing!

Excellent stuff!