To help celebrate the recently changed water valve that will unite our neighbours water bill with ours, we thought the construction area needed some dressing up.
Hopefully when the utility workers return, they will appreciate our spirit.
The rig Kevin built has been slightly improved. We added some shims (made of styrofoam) to raise the table top and added this slick coat of red nail polish.
The blade was basically disappearing when we were cutting the styrofoam, so hopefully this fixes it. Also, makes any bloodshed less conspicuous.
Nice lines … thanks table top reverse half ban jig saw!
Still a ways to go, but here’s how far we are in tracing the letters. Then, we cut.
A quick one: Hiba traces letters onto styrofoam to be soon cut out and then painted. Her wrist hurts. That makes three of us.
A list of to-dos.
A form for a special occasions permit. We’re thinking the launch on June 21st should be festive.
Also, we started playing with the stamp we got for our letter library. Hiba Abdallah is an art assassin.
Stamps are really fun.
Also, this is happening outside our storefront. Reminds me of SRSI.
And this is the jigsaw rig that Kevin built.
And here’s a stack of 200 traced letters waiting to be cut out. And now, the afternoon slump.
Save the Date: June 21st, 2012 at 7pm
CIVIC SPACE (411 Pelissier St, downtown Windsor)
On June 21st at 7pm, we’ll be kicking things CIVIC SPACE with the Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). This open community project invites anyone and everyone to come borrow from our letterset to caption the city around them.
With Windsor at the edge of so many transitions, how might we collectively reclaim and create our own public narratives about the future of our city through this playful intervention?
Anyone participating will be issued a Letter Library Card and will able to sign out 12″ 3D letters from our collection to create their own temporary installation, document it with one of our single-use cameras, and ultimately help to build an archive of new captions for the city’s build environment.
More soon.
This one goes to out Rosina and Sara … a look at an incredible zine for an incredibly fun project sponsored by Creative Time, SPACE PROGRAM: MARS. Think DIY aesthetics, playful criticality, and really engaging performative works.
From the project description:
Artist Tom Sachs takes his SPACE PROGRAM to the next level with a four week mission to Mars that recasts the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall as an immersive space odyssey with an installation of dynamic and meticulously crafted sculptures. Using his signature bricolage technique and simple materials that comprise the daily surrounds of his New York studio, Sachs engineers the component parts of the mission—exploratory vehicles, mission control, launch platforms, suiting stations, special effects, recreational amenities, and Mars landscape—exposing as much the process of their making as the complexities of the culture they reference.SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is a demonstration of all that is necessary for survival, scientific exploration, and colonization in extraterrestrial environs: from food delivery systems and entertainment to agriculture and human waste disposal. Sachs and his studio team of thirteen will man the installation, regularly demonstrating the myriad procedures, rituals, and tasks of their mission.
With the recent shuttering of NASA’s shuttle program and the shifting focus towards privatized space travel, SPACE PROGRAM: MARS takes on timely significance within Sachs’s work, which provokes reflection on the haves and have-nots, utopian follies and dystopian realities, while asking barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation. SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is organized by Park Avenue Armory and Creative Time and is curated by Creative Time President and Artistic Director Anne Pasternak and Park Avenue Armory Consulting Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds.
For more information on CIVIC SPACE and its programming: please visit civicspace.info.
We’re incredibly excited to announce a new initiative that will become the centre of our focus for the next two years.
CIVIC SPACE (Community Innovation through Vital Interaction & Collaboration Space) will launch on Thursday, June 21st at 411 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor. Supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, CIVIC SPACE will serve as a hub for our events, public activities, and research around locality, infrastructure, education, and creative practice as a driver for civic change.
This storefront space (once a textile store and before that a jeweller) will soon host new community projects, artist residencies, DIY workshops, public lectures and a range of other new initiatives for the next 24-months. CIVIC SPACE will aim to engage the public in addressing community challenges through new programming and activities that initiate collaborative creative problem solving.
On June 21st at 7pm, we’ll be kicking things off with the Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). This open community project invites anyone and everyone to come borrow from our letterset to caption the city around them. With Windsor at the edge of so many transitions, how might we collectively reclaim and create our own public narratives about the future of our city through this playful intervention? Anyone participating will be issued a Letter Library Card and will able to sign out 12″ 3D letters from our collection to create their own temporary installation, document it with one of our single-use cameras, and ultimately help to build an archive of new captions for the city’s build environment.
We’ll also be announcing the rest of our summer programming very soon … stay close.
CIVIC SPACE would not be possible without the incredibly generous support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
P.S. If you’re interested in applying for a residency, looking to connect for a new collaborative project, or just interested in (finally) making the trip to Windsor, be in touch.
Tom Provost came by a couple weeks ago with an idea for a new collaboration. We’ve work with Tom before on How to Forget the Border Completely — in particular the proposals for 1,000 Pedestrian Walkways and the Windsor-Detroit Portals. In short, the new project is to take the form of a triangular sign, something like you might find on an empty lot waiting to be developed. On each of the three sides of the sign would be a proposed development for the particular site on which the sign is located, along with three perspectives on the possibilities of that development ever taking place or not.
The development would be a large-scale proposal — something that could undoubtedly transform a selected site, and would probably verge on the impossible — would attempt to articulate not just a “new use” for a selected site, but a one that might reflect the values and directions that we would like to see the city take on. We’re approaching this with the mindset of impatience and lack of confidence in the powers that be to create a truly interesting place to live. The proposals will aim to engage in imaginative speculation, but also try to draw into a critical discourse the ways in which we seem to disarm ourselves collectively from building truly great community assets. We so often rely and play into the very imaginary game of community consultation on projects long ago set (mostly) in stone, this seems like a great project to assert a different stance, process, and set of ideas for developing various parts of our city.
Also, these stir sticks were less a model, and more of a visualization tool for us to talk through the project. In early stages, I’m always so intrigued with how things shift and circle back around and change entirely.
When I caught up with Tom earlier this week, we spent a lot of time talking form.
Trying to find a balance between efficiency with the materials we’ll buy (how many faces, ideally, will come out of on piece of plywood), and making these things somewhat transportable led to discussions about size, the number of them we might build, and certainly the level of spontaneity in their arrival(s) to the selected site(s). All of these elements in turn vastly change the “weight” (in all senses) of the signs — where’s the line between an authority in structure and an intimidation (and in turn backgrounding effect) of the structures?
We took notes on this really basic paper (almost the feel of a smooth construction paper). In the past, Tom has used this for making the bases of architectural models, which looks incredible. We’ll be using a similar technique to basically grid and create a larger image for each face of the triangular sign.
We’re looking at these signs being somewhere around 2ft x 4ft for each face. The sketch above was looking at other possible shapes.
A visual walk through of our discussion.
We also talked about the possibility of these forming a temporary a wall or partition that could provide more surfaces and the possibility to randomize the form on site, using hinges for each face.
But we ended up revisiting the three-sided structure, coming to a fairly resolved (at this point) direction, moving towards utilizing the three sides of the structure to discuss the limits of approach that various actors take to something like a development. What views, acts of persuasion, money, political tactics, and rhetoric does a developer bring to a new proposed project versus that of a city councillor or that of a community member who lives in the neighbourhood in which a new development is being proposed?
We’ll build later this summer.
These are early days for a spontaneous new project, but here’s how we’re starting. Rosina, Hiba, and I met on Friday and after going through our usual to-do list, we started discussing some new projects. These new projects are all going to be tied together, and we’ll be writing about what that tie might look like soon.
The starting point for this new project — maybe called the Letter Library Project, or maybe something very different — came from thinking about how we might collectively be framing the city of Windsor as it transitions (slowly) and what we might want to reframe, piece by piece. The city is once again at the top of the unemployment statistics, but there are some large infrastructural projects that are going to dramatically change the physicality of the city itself and in turn, the way we experience it, though it remains to be seen if this will actually change the city, or just reframe it for us.
And the background of this project might actually go back even a bit further, in terms of material, as Rosina and I had met earlier in the week to talk about working on some signage. Research led us to wanting to experiment with styrofoam — givens its rigidity and ease to work with.
We saw a lot of videos online of people cutting styrofoam into different shapes (and certainly letters) with hot wires, electric knives, and yes jigsaws.
We had a jigsaw and so we went to it. The styrofoam we got was packaged at Home Depot as basically made for crafts and very small home projects. We weren’t sure that it would be dense enough for the cuts — at the time, we had assumed that the denser (and pink) insulation type of styrofoam would work better, but it was too expensive to bother testing with.
Given the scale of what we’re planning to do, the cost would have been enormous, so we went with the cheaper stuff to just get a feel for possible scale and process, even if the material itself may need to be changed down the road. But, as you can see above, the jigsaw with a 24 TPI metal blade did the trick and cut the styrofoam with a decent level of precision without the messy edges we had anticipated.
Hiba and I both took some test cuts before deciding to attempt a more complex shape.
We selected the letter R for a test.
Hand-drawn for now.
Rosina made the cuts.
Easy.
Rosina with the saw.
Hiba arrived a few minutes later.
We had a test letter.
Another bonus of this type of styrofoam was the thickness allows the letter to stand up.
I think Rosina was really happy.
The cuts were fairly good, though we briefly wondered about finding a better way to avoid an angle on the edge of the letters — that is, the face of the depth of each letter would undulate a bit as we failed to hold the saw consistently at 90 degrees. A ban saw would be good for this, but it’s not essential.
I was trying to get a sense of how much we were moving the saw and what the effect was on the angle of the depth.
The letter R moves into the wild…
… and then returns for a quick coat of paint.
Spray paint would eat the styrofoam, but craft paint was no problem.
More painting.
The letter R dries.
Then, some duct tape.
Given how incredibly light-weight the styrofoam is, duct-tape makes for a great mounting device. On brick.
On wood.
On metal.
On a tree didn’t work as well, there wasn’t a lot of surface area for the tape.
So, that’s the very early stages of a new project. The next steps will be cutting out a bunch of letter templates with the vinyl cutter in card stock, stencilling, cutting, and then a painting party, and then the project launch. Assuming all goes to plan.
And then there’s this … more soon.
This week, the 18th Annual Media City Film Festival kicks off with a huge range of screenings featuring incredible works from around the globe and just down the street.
We’ll be co-presenting Thursday night’s International Program 3 with our friends at Mayworks, and our own Michelle Soulliere is also on the Media City board, but beyond just being good friends, the festival curates amazing films and a lot of other programming at the Art Gallery of Windsor that’s one of the highlights of the summer here in Windsor.
This year, things kick off with the first public screening of the Super 8mm films created by IAIN BAXTER& from the mid-1960s to the 1970s.
Check out the program, if you’re in the area, you should totally make a point of coming out, or making the trek down!
