Manchester Time Piece, 21st June 2011.
1pm
Practicalities!
On Tuesday we will spend the whole day, 7am to 7pm following the shadow around the city. Most of the time will be the bits in between when we are waiting for the hour to pass, and looking out for a bit of blue sky so we can check the position. Are there cafe’s open at 7am? Will we have to buy 12 cups of tea in order to have a little sit down between hours? It’s going to be an awfully long day!
Social Net-working Part 2
According to TweetReach there have been 50 references to @McrTimePiece in the last 21 hours, and they have reached 44,464 people. What does that mean? How much influence have those tweets had? What proportion of those tweets have actually been been read by their recipients? Will the tweets translate into an audience for the work?
Manchester Time Piece is part of the Manchester Art Crawl, and we will be doing tours of Manchester Time Piece at 3pm, 4pm and 5pm on Saturday 2nd July.
Social Net-Working?
One aspect of this project has been the experimentation with social networking media, and it has been fascinating. Our twitter account plodded along quite slowly for a couple of weeks until one day, mentions by a few key people turned a trickle into a flood and our followers more than doubled in a single day.
We have to keep reminding ourselves that twitter still has a small and exclusive following. But it has helped us generate a lot of interest in the project and not only a one off bit of information, like a press article, but the establishing of a kind of relationship with people who then have a small investment in us. It will be interesting to see it this translates into an audience for the project.
The flip side is the time it takes and the potential for compulsive tweeting and tweet-watching. We are certainly spending more time in front of the computer, is that a good thing?
There is also our experience with Facebook, where a lack of understanding of the mechanics meant that some friends ended up in our group, whether they wanted to or not. This was not welcomed by one vocal person, but I suspect there were plenty more who were equally pissed off.
On the other hand, the Facebook group has elicited a lot of comments, stories, quotes, questions, which is great for us and provides us with material which we can work with later.
It’s a mixed bag.
The quality of shadows
What we noticed today is that the further away the object is, the more diffuse the shadow is. So the shadow of the Beetham Tower is quite hard to see when you are up close to it.
Manchester Art Crawl is an artist led event, and is part of the ‘Not Part Of’ festival running alongside The Manchester International Festival from 2-16th July. It is a large scale inclusive platform for contemporary artists living and working in Manchester beyond.
Manchester Time Piece is proud to be selected as part of the Manchester Art Crawl.
Follow @MCRArtCrawl
What is Manchester Time Piece?
On Midsummer’s Day, Tuesday 21st June 2011, Tern Collective will transform Manchester into a giant sundial, using the Beetham Tower as the gnomon (shadow-maker). Annie Harrison, Jude Macpherson and Jacqueline Wylie will spend dawn to dusk on the longest day of the year, following the shadow of the tower. On the hour, every hour, they will mark the postion of the shadow - mapping the passage of time - by leaving a photograph of the Beetham Tower taken from somewhere in the city.
We will tweet each hour to tell our followers about the position of the shadow, and the position of the photograph, and in the following days we will post a downloadable route map so that the audience can participate in the journey.
You can follow us on twitter @McrTimePiece, on on Facebook, and we would love to see your photographs of Beetham Tower, your reflections on the passage of time and the movement of shadows.
