Justin – Page 19 – Broken City Lab

June 19, 2012July 5, 2018

Exhibition Design (in progress)

As we continue to paint the letters, we’re now moving onto some exhibition design for the launch of the Letter Library.

Really preliminary ideas here … but the gist of it is around wanting the work to feel open…

Not sure that we’ll go with tape on top of the photos like this.

4×6 photos and corresponding negatives.

Lovely test stamp.

Call and response.

Excite, grid.

A proposed stamp for the backs of the letters.

Hiba and Sara are still at the space, I’m heading back later this evening. Huge shout-out to Kiki for kicking ass alongside Kevin today, painting white styrofoam white.

More tomorrow.

June 19, 2012July 5, 2018

Paint! Paint! Paint! An Animated Gif

Getting it done, first thing in the AM.

June 19, 2012July 5, 2018

Letter Library Card & Stamp Test, Example, etc.

From yesterday afternoon — testing the stamp that Rosina set up and the cards we just got back from the printers.

We also got a fun package from Hamilton Artist Inc. that included some of the “questionnaires” we did from the last art crawl.

These will eventually make their way into our forthcoming publication.

Detail, stamp test.

Yesterday afternoon, Kevin and I tackled painting the letters, while Hiba cut some more. Into the evening, news came that Kevin had finished cutting all the letters!

Make sure you pick some of these up on Thursday, ok?

June 18, 2012July 5, 2018

In Store: The Border

Another instalment of In Store, featuring Lee Rodney discussing her Border Bookmobile project, in the multi-part documentary that our exceptionally talented friend, Daragh Sankey, has been putting together. Here’s his notes on the latest:

Ed. note: Hey, it’s been a while! I did a lot of overtime and also a freelance job and had to prioritize all that cash money work over this project, but I’ve managed to get one more done. This one is about Lee Rodney and her project the Border Bookmobile. There will be two more films after this: one is a mild recut of an earlier short I did, about Andrea Carvalho. The other concerns Leesa Bringas’ Postcards To Indian Road. I have another film coming, about Broken City Lab itself, but it has ballooned in scope and length to encompass events outside of the SRSI residency, so I don’t know if it belongs as part of this series of films. Besides, who knows how long it will take me to finish!

Lee Rodney’s reputation preceded her. She’s a professor at the University of Windsor, and some of the residents of SRSI and Broken City Lab members had been her students, and spoke very highly of her. Sure enough, there were many fascinating things to document during her stay: the bookmobile itself, the tour of Windsor’s forgotten neighbourhoods, and many fascinating conversations, including the one with Justin that forms the backbone of this film.

There are a number of borders crossing through this film. One is the border between Detroit and Windsor, that divides what in many ways should be considered one city. Another is the border between city and suburb. Also there is the border you see in the final shot. Nature borders the city, but not only at the outside edge. It has a way of creeping back in.

June 18, 2012July 5, 2018

Tuesday Afternoon: Work continues, now with Postcards and the Library Cards

Lucy stopped by this morning to keep cutting. Hiba and I painted the letters.

White it is.

We had a lot of leftover wall paint, which means we not only have more than enough paint, but the letter faces will gain a bit of rigidity and protection since it’s epoxy paint.

Hiba paints.

After trying to paint the letters on the wall, we shifted to a make-shift table. Easier to avoid paint running.

We made a drying rack.

Protection. Recommended originally by Jennifer Willet. We should actually have more of these on hand.

The drying rack doing it’s job.

But, of course, it didn’t fit many letters, so we just started lying them out on the table.

Two brushes — these might be leftovers from Make This Better.

Also, picked up the postcards from Dan Bombardier, while he installed for an upcoming show at Artcite.

Also, Daragh Sankey posted another section of In-Store, his documentary on SRSI … we’ll post it on here.

Stack of postcards!

Oh, and our library cards for the Letter Library.

The back of the postcards, as you can see — lots to come!

June 15, 2012July 5, 2018

Nothing like being thorough: how we make decisions, slowly

Last night Hiba, Danielle and I met to do some more prep work on the letters for the Letter Library launch on June 21st. We painted another test letter E a different shade of grey and started to populate a wall with some more of the tests. It was excellent to see more than a few letters up at once to start to get a sense of the scale of the cluster.

Danielle tried her hand at cutting the letters for a little while, but we quickly shifted over to more tests, while also playing catch up and talking through some other projects we want to kick off later this summer.

We head out with a grey letter E and a two-tone S.

This was around 9pm or later … so we didn’t get a read of this shade of grey in the harsher sunlight. There’s something interesting about the grey — certainly it doesn’t pop like the white (or the black really for that matter), but it feels a bit more anchored.

We also put up a white letter Y. It’s no surprise it stands out the most, outside.

Danielle moves the letters around to other locations.

YES, more often.

Hiba, Lucy, and I returned earlier this morning. Hiba installed some rows of white letters to get a better sense of how they’ll look on the walls.

We also figured it might make them easier to paint and not take up every square inch of walking space while we continue to prep.

Taping the letters.

Meanwhile, Lucy takes on the jig saw.

We’re going to play a lot with the lighting.

Letters temporarily installed on a couple of the walls. We’ll end up putting them a lot closer together on the final install.

We’re still planning to paint the faces white to remove the black lines left over from tracing.

The effects are interesting — about what I expected where they feel more a part of the wall than objects to take out and distribute. Of course, getting closer to the letters easily reveals that they’re styrofoam, but we’ll have to work out a really straight-forward set of instructions to carry out the project.

The plan going forward — finish cutting the letters today and Monday, start (and hopefully finish) painting Monday, start clean-up and install Tuesday, and do all the other prep by Thursday morning, giving us the better part of the day for contingency.

June 14, 2012July 5, 2018

Drift v1.5 Available Now: Some Updates to Help You Get Even More Lost in Familiar Places

Great news! Drift v1.5 is available now on the App Store.

There are some really useful changes, including a better way to navigate from step to step in your Drift, some light tidying up upon registration, longer sessions to keep you logged in, and some fixes and adjustments to the photo upload process. All of that means that it’s easier to use and the documentation from your Drifts should look great!

The other major change is that Drift now requires iOS 5.1 or later.

And, if you haven’t already checked it out … if you mark your photos public, they’ll now appear in our sidebar with the instruction and a link to Google Maps with the location of where you took the photo, and of course credited to your name.

Drift helps you get lost in familiar places by guiding you on a walk using randomly assembled instructions. Each instruction will ask you to move in a specific direction and, using the compass, look for something normally hidden or unnoticed in our everyday experiences.

This project was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant for Emerging Artists.

June 14, 2012July 5, 2018

Signal To Noise (think old school rotary text board randomly looking for dictionary words)

I saw this in the Globe and Mail this morning and thought it was worth reposting here given how deep we’re into thinking about text in public spaces at the moment … seems like it would be a really fun installation to see in person! The project is called S/N (Signal to Noise) and can be found in Terminal 1 at Pearson Airport in Toronto. It’s part of this year’s Luminato Festival, one of the preeminent arts festivals in North America, having commissioned over 50 new works of art, and featured 6,500 artists from 35+ countries. Luminato launched in 2007 with a work by one of our favourites, Rafael Lozano Hemmer‘s Pulse Front: Relational Architecture 12.

As for S/N, here’s the project description…

The transformation of random letters into legible words is at the technocentric heart of S/N (Signal To Noise), created by the Belgian artists LAb[au]. The installation is constructed from an assortment of discarded technology and salvaged split-flaps, components from the information displays that predated LED monitors in public spaces like airports and train stations.

Arranged in a circular grid, the flaps randomly rotate until the system identifies a word. The flow of words creates an auto-poetic sequence, inviting viewers to interpret its meaning.

LAb[au] explores the theme of space and time constructs relative to information processes. Its three members – Manuel Abendroth, Jérôme Decock and Els Vermang – specialize in system art and are mainly active within the interactive, reactive and generative realm.

June 13, 2012July 5, 2018

First Decisions of the Day … and notes from breakfast

First decisions of the day to be made — whether to commit or not to painting the letters black or white. Somehow this has been one of the longest ongoing discussions we’ve had for a while. The next step though is to paint and test in the wild.

The letters from the table view.

Notes from a meeting with the wonderful Kika Thorne. She’s coming back to Windsor in September for a project with the AGW.

Our first piece of mail showed up today from our friends at Hamilton Artist Inc.

Also, breakfast of champions with Kika — Ms. Vickie’s Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar with coffee from Milk.

And, in between, a meeting with the City of Windsor and the Arts Council Windsor & Region — good things ahead.

June 12, 2012July 5, 2018

Tuesday Recap: in case you missed it, super jigsaw rig, graphic design in progress & other notes

Tuesday at CIVIC SPACE with design sessions, styrofoam letters, bunting, meetings, and polaroids (29)

In case you missed any of our spontaneous posts earlier today, here’s a quick recap of all the stuff that we got done!

It may look a little strange, but our jigsaw rig Kevin put together has really been a huge help today. Hiba made it through nearly 70 letters — and no wrist pain!

Some final touches like this shim helped us to get it fine-tuned earlier today.

We had the cutting speed fairly high, and initially the jigsaw wasn’t quite locked down enough, so our cuts weren’t as straight as we would have liked.

However, once we got it all locked down, Hiba started speeding through the letters, which is completely necessary. We have about 400 letters to cut.

But, before that, Lucy came by to starting planning a project / event with Hiba and get up to speed with how things have been moving along here at CIVIC SPACE.

Lucy did a kick ass job with our press releases late last month and we’re really happy she’s back! This is how she is currently keeping track of things.

It was a full house today, Rosina and Sara came by and double-teamed some design work that needs to get done ASAP in preparation for our launch next Thursday!

We’re still pulling from these notes that we took during a meeting a couple weeks ago as we start to assemble a basic schedule design.

Hiba made this note.

I spent the afternoon working on some answers for an interview.

Hiba flipped back to cutting more letters.

The library thus far.

Here’s a ribbon from a gift from DodoLab. Reminds me how much I love that gold printing / plating (what is it really called?) reminds me of track and field ribbons.