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Day 3 & 4: Glaciers and Wreckage

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Over the weekend, we took a trip out to the Bow Glacier to see first hand where Calgary’s only water source begins. The three hour drive proved to be rather scenic with beautiful mountains in the background.

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Anticipating the scary scenario of encountering a bear, we equipped ourselves with a bear bell and bear spray. Both those items became useless when we spotted a bear and her cub on the side of the Trans Canada Highway. The black bear was so uninterested in us taking photos, she never looked up at us and just wandered back into the forest. I guess they’re not as scary as we thought.

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Josh getting his first glimpse of the Bow Glacier.

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After spending a few minutes staring at the glacier, we realized that we still had to hike to the top.

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About an hour later, we arrived to the top of the waterfall. Seen above in the top right, this waterfall is spilling glacier water directly down into the Bow Lake and eventually feeding the Bow River. It’s pretty amazing to imagine the distance the water travels; from the glacier all the way to the homes and gardens of Calgarians. The theme of time, flow, and repetition keep coming up in our research.

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Yesterday, Randy Niessen, the Programming Coordinator at TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary and the Project Implementation and Development Lead for WATERSHED+, took us on a bike ride to see what’s left of the damage that the flood left behind.

Above: The 10 foot mark on the meter next to the bridge is how high the river rose in this area.

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Trees completely ripped out of the ground.

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Temporary fences mend the completely eroded trail.

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Josh observing the wreckage. Behind him, once cemented stones have been completely ripped out of the ground.

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This part of the trail is now completely gone.

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A lot of sites throughout Calgary are still under repair. However, it’s quite amazing to note that the majority of flood issues were taken care of during the first week after the flood.

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This bridge collapsed as the water rose and began eroding it. A cargo train was crossing over at the same time and it took search and rescue crews 12 hours to back the train safely off the bridge. They’re still working on its reconstruction.

More soon.

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Prototyping Projects for Halifax

Josh, Hiba, and I spent Monday prototyping some projects for our upcoming project in Halifax. This was building off of some small macquettes that Hiba did a week ago.

We wanted to work at full scale, so we got a bit of wood and started thinking through building.

The process was really quick and dirty, we just wanted to get some things closer to full scale to start looking at them and figuring out how we’ll move forward.

We’ll likely end up rebuilding these out in Halifax anyways, so these really will act just as a model.

Some of the tools. Yes, a nail gun. More fun and less sturdy than a drill.

Hiba squaring things up.

Josh, perfecting.

Hiba nail-gunning.

It stands.

Nail gun attack.

Circular saw. Serious.

Inspecting the cut.

 

The second leg…

More reinforcements.

And this as a result.

A very light-weight and portable sign easel. Designed for anyone to borrow and use for their own messaging.

Not quite scaled appropriately. We’ll end up with more surface area for the hardboard and the poster will actually be made on a roll of paper.

And maybe we’ll turn it into a backpack.

Josh seems comfortable enough.

Other ideas include adding some wheels and making it foldable for even easier transport.

Then, onto the next project model — the bike projector attachment.

This was seriously fast prototyping, and a lot of fun. Though it’s possible that Josh had moments of panic watching joints going together that were not measured, cut correctly, or even all that well secured.

But, here’s the gist of it…

Almost a reverse trailer for the front of the bike to hold a projector and a lot, lot, lot of extension cord.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll add some castors and more bracing. More soon.

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Bike Rack Sculptures

Bike Rack in Parkdale

With the recent addition of new bike racks in downtown Windsor, which I’m happy to see, and with the recent addition to some of those racks with some yarn bombs, downtown feels a bit more like a place, rather than just an any-space-whatever.

I’m also aware though, that Tecumseh has had an ongoing bike rack design competition, which has obviously been successful elsewhere. Above, there’s a photo from a recent installation of a bike rack sculpture in the Parkdale area of Toronto. With so, so, so many talented sculptors and artists in the city, this should be standard practice. Why doesn’t Artcite try to work with the city to have a small bike rack sculpture competition for the downtown core?

Alternatively, we here at Broken City Lab are working on brainstorming new ways to turn any piece of infrastructure into a functioning, safe, and secure bike rack.

[via Worldchanging & spacing]

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Graffiti Using GPS

Invisible Bombing, GRL Tokyo

This project, executed by GRL Tokyo, took me a while to figure out. Basically this image, which reads “The Invisible is Eternal,” was made by riding a bike with a GPS device attached to it, then uploading the resulting kml file to Google Maps. It’s pretty insane to see this that this was done on a bike, though aside from that, I’m not sure about it (and the 19 minute video of the condensed bike ride doesn’t help either).

Maybe something is lost in the translation, but I think conceptually, this would have been better as a map made as a kind of algorithm to move the rider over some greater distances than he normally would, then documenting the experience of that process. Of course, in terms of how it was actually executed, that description is probably pretty close, but the reason behind doing it is different (writing / bombing without actually making a mark vs psychogeographic interests), and ultimately kind of dull.

I thought it was worth noting, given some of the Google Earth related projects we’re working on.