Come & see what happens at 2pm tomorrow…

The radios have been adopted

Laura’s stack of letters and of first memories of mac is growing by the minute. The latter includes the family who fulfil John English’s original vision of the place: they met there as young people involved in the activities, continued to do stuff at mac, formed their own theatre company and now their kids are also regular visitors to/users of mac. Derek’s sound bank for the Midland Radio Orchestra is growing – people have been tuning his stack of old radios, and grouping them into ‘orchestral families’, and he’s been making audio recordings of the contents of visitors’ sheds to use in the sound piece. The last photo is of the performance group’s work and features Saranjit as John English. If you’d like to see what everyone’s been up to, there are two more days to visit the ongoing residencies, or at 2pm on Friday there’ll be a public sharing of the week’s work – click here for more details.

End of Day 2. Another busy day with lots of visitors to the two sheds containing artists in residence, and plenty of performance and singing work going on in the other two sheds. Also starting to think about how we’ll share what we’ve done come Friday…

Some years ago, Talking Birds produced the Virtual Fringe Festival [ www.virtualfringe.info ] a festival of possibility for the city of Coventry. It was designed to animate spaces around Coventry city centre in people’s imaginations and open up some of the possibilities that are dormant in many of the city’s spaces.

Last week, Andy Field of the excellent Forest Fringe [ www.forestfringe.co.uk/ ] had an idea for a Ghost Festival [ http://lookingforastronauts.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/the-imaginary-festival/ ] to run alongside the Edinburgh Fringe, and asked Twitter for 140 character events to populate the festival. As we love virtual festivals (often more than real festivals) we had to join in. Here are our events (look out for them if you are heading up to Edinburgh this year…)

› A man in blue overalls flyposts sky photos. His pasting brush plays ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. The clouds contain treasure hunt clues.

› A pea green mini with rooftop tannoy drives round broadcasting tweeted msgs of hope + despair containing the ghostfest hashtag.

› A rickshaw bicycle ridden by an ancient mariner proffers lifts. As he pedals, he whispers tales of adventure on the high seas.

› Small white kennels are dotted about the city. On the roof of each kennel is a braille panel describing the fantastical contents.

› A fortune teller hands balloons out to children. If the balloon is popped, a prediction of exquisite wistfulness is released.

› A woman with a basket of raspberries exchanges fruit for secrets.

› A man in a leather apron invites people into his smokehouse. They emerge days later, yellow and smelling faintly of woodsmoke.

› A lady, in an ice cream van whose jingle is a ringtone, collects old mobile phones and grinds them up to make sorbet.

The Project 42 Team Meets!

Midland Radio Orchestra tuning up.