It’s that time of the week, Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, January 27th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be working through some upcoming projects, plotting the potential for a citywide scavenger hunt, and finalizing details for the EC Row project.
I played the lottery tonight for the first time tonight, after Mike mentioning there being a large jackpot at Tuesday’s Office Hours. If I’m successful in game 1, I’ll put aside 80% of the winnings for Broken City Lab micro-grants, though which anyone can apply for funds to fix the city. I chose the numbers at random and they are 9, 17, 25, 31, 33, 39.
To bring attention to pollution, namely that of the ocean-type, Surfrider Foundation has created a delectable assortment of hand-harvested oceanic delights.
“…they collected actual trash from beaches around the U.S., packaged it like food, and left it on display at farmer’s markets. It’s site-specific, appropriate, impacting, meaningful, shocking, and an actual consumer insight into the very act they’re in the middle of. Someone about to buy fish from the same ocean as the trash in their hands can’t help but be at least a little more enlightened as to how pollution isn’t someone else’s problem.”
This led me to think: what do we actually harvest directly from the earth and market in Windsor besides salt? I don’t think I’ve lived “in” Windsor long enough to come up with an answer. Any ideas?
Note the sarcastic descriptions on the packages.
Broken City Lab Office Hours last night were hugely productive due, in no small part, to the many amazing people around the table last night. We completed a test with the flagging tape at Lebel (as you can see above) for the EC Row project and continued working on the LED sign. There’s lots of pictures of all the action after the jump.
From what I understand, Google Maps updates once a year or so (I’d guess even less than that). So, I think now would be a good time to start on a project like this, as according to these maps, Caesar’s Windsor is still under construction.
That parking garage on the corner of Park and Pelissier would be a fantastic candidate for a project like this. I think noting to the world that “we’re still alive” is going to be increasingly important, as Windsor continues to have the highest unemployment rate in Canada.
I recently got a copy of Issue 6 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, based on a recommendation from WMMNA. I’m still making my way through it, but an article by Lisa Anne Auerbach entitled, “D.D.I.Y.: Don’t Do It Yourself,” really caught my attention.
Auerbach basically argues that D.I.Y. culture has been hijacked by corporations and their marketing departments and we’re not going to get it back anytime soon. What had started as a revolt against these very centers of consumption has been flipped on its head and is being sold back to us as a lifestyle brand. Auerbach goes on to issue a new battle cry, “D.D.I.Y,” noting that we only need to look as far as our neighbour’s garage for the tools or skills we need to complete a project (and in all likelihood, that neighbour is looking for some skill we have). In her words,
“[It] means working with friends, hiring a professional, consuming wisely and conscientiously, and providing for ourselves while working with others. We do what we do best, do what we know how to do, while allowing others to help us with what we are not equipped for.”
Of course, there are many things that can benefit from a D.I.Y. mindset—not the least of which include being able to get things done for yourself, but in a broader sense, I know there are a lot of people I see every week that can do things a lot better than I can, and in turn there are likely some things that I can do better than them. Why don’t I ask for their help more often (or offer my help for that matter)? I’m not entirely sure, but it’s something to start considering a bit more seriously.
You can read the entire article online.
It’s that time of the week, Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, January 20th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be working through some upcoming projects, continuing work on our LED sign, and plotting the potential for a citywide scavenger hunt.
Like I had promised, here is another one of the Intermod Series projects titled: Low Altitude Atmospheric & Civic Modifications. I think it’s sort of beautifully sad in it’s futility and highlights a pretty important perspective that seems often ignored.
“This project used rockets with payloads to create micro-alterations of a city’s near atmospheric environment. There were 5 different payloads which when released into the air, propagated the designed effects determined by the use of therapeutics, noise and EMF screening, weather adjustment, and unusual optical events. The launch schedule was distributed over a 5-month period.”
PowerHouse over in Detroit has started a blog! This is great, as I had previously wondered about the timeline of their activities, being able to read a blog really helps to contextualize their progress. Rather than trying to recount the story behind this pink fence in my own words, I’ll give you a brief quote from their blog:
“Anyway one day I mixed up some pink paint and employed two neighborhood theives to help me paint the fence. The house that the fence belongs to had gone vacant in another foreclosure and was slowly being taken apart. My two painters were not unlike many in the neighborhood that were taking advantage of the foreclosures, in fact they had taken advantage of this very house on occasion. So I set them up with brushes and rollers and paint and we went at it.” (pinkfence)
Head over to their blog, add it to your RSS reader, and keep an eye out, I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting things coming out of there.
Tuesday night’s Broken City Lab Office Hours were successful, but as usual, all too short. Spending the majority of the time in Lebel’s wood shop, we started working on our LED sign, but still have a long ways to go with it. We cut plexiglass, drilled holes, and started soldering—I think we’ll continue next Monday and Tuesday night at Office Hours. Lots of photos of the whole process after the jump.