We spent part of Monday afternoon doing a site visit for an upcoming project we’ve been planning for a while. The EC Row Walkway crosses over the 6 lanes of EC Row and is a pretty incredible view. We took some measurements and did a quick visibility test. We were only up there for about fifteen minutes, but there were a lot of people honking, which makes me suspect this walkway is pretty underutilized. Photos after the jump.
On Monday morning we set out all of the stuff that we figured we would need to start figuring out how to make an LED sign (+ some other things that aren’t really necessary for this project). We cut wires, soldered, used resistors, and mocked up a circuit on a breadboard and it was really, really fun. Lots of photos after the jump.
Continue reading “Soldering LEDs + Other Adventures in Electricity”
In preparation for Art’s 1,000,046 Birthday Celebration this Saturday, January 17, 2009 at Phog (starts at 8:30pm, $3 for students and unemployed and Artcite members, $4 for everyone else), we spent Sunday evening making Broken City Lab fortune cookies from scratch. There’s lots of pictures of our adventures in baking after the jump.
It’s that time of the week, Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, January 13th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be discussing some ongoing projects and likely starting to work on an LED sign!
FYI—Sandwich Towne Improvement Plan @ Council Chambers tomorrow night, January 12th 6pm. Not sure if I can make it, but if anyone else does, let us know how it goes.
Maya Lin has created a number of public art works, memorials, and has increasingly shifted her practice towards studies of landscape, often rendering rivers, geographic relief, and water lines. Interestingly, many of her recent works are made exclusively of reclaimed materials—silver from jewelry, computers, and photographic process, and lumber from sustainably harvested wood.
There’s an interesting, but lengthy, video lecture by Maya Lin on the De Young Gallery website, where she explains a lot of her work and the processes behind it.
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With our interest in mapping (and using the fancy technology of Google Maps to try to do so), I thought it might be interesting to post on this project, which is very much not about fancy technology. Katy Asher, a student in Portland’s MFA in Art and Social Practice program, along with Ariana Jacob and Amber Bell, have initiated a project that “aims to make a vending cart of maps made by people from Portland.”
This feels like an intersection of a number of projects we’ve discussed and are also ongoing in the community, and makes me wonder what subjective maps would look like for other Windsorites. Asking for people to map their routes to work, their favourite restaurants, their neighbourhoods would certainly provide an interesting look at the way distances and geography are collapsed or exaggerated and might help to discover some other broken parts of our city and the way it functions (or doesn’t).
Across the city of Lvov, Ukraine, you’ll find clues for this giant crossword puzzle. At night, the answers become visible as a lightly glowing fluorescent colour.
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300′ of bright orange flagging tape, $5.97 + tax. It’s fairly thin, but should be really easy to work with. We might have to double it up to make it visible on the fence, that is, double the width of each letter. We should test at Lebel later this week, or maybe on Monday before we go out for a site visit and measurements.
Knitta formed in 2005 out of frustration of unfinished knitting projects sitting around the house. Instead of trying to finish sweaters and mittens, they decided to go out and bomb the city’s infrastructure (and sometimes garbage) with yarn, starting with their hometown of Houston, Texas and eventually tagging the Great Wall of China. Above you can see a project they did in France. They’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this project, though things seem to have slowed over the last year.
Anyways, it reminded me of that idea Michelle brought up about dressing up infrastructure in the city for Halloween.