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Accommodations & Details on Attending Homework

Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is just two months away and we’ll be announcing a lot of information around the conference schedule and activities in the coming weeks.

First though, we wanted to post some information for those of you traveling from out of town.

Accommodations

Group Rates

We have secured a group rate for anyone attending Homework to stay at one of three hotels in Windsor’s downtown core. If you book the room, please note that you would like the Broken City Lab Homework Conference rate. This group rate is only valid until September 19th, 2011.

Hilton Windsor: $115 per room, per night, $11 self parking per car, per night or $21 valet parking per car, per night.

Windsor Riverside Inn (formerly the Radisson): $105 per room, per night, $10 self parking per car, per night.

Travelodge Hotel: $89 per room, per night, $10 self parking per car, per night.

Details on Attending

Schedule & Location:

The conference panel discussion schedule will be detailed in forthcoming posts, but as an overview: Day 1, October 21, will be made up of panel discussions from selected participants, and Day 2, October 22, will be a series of group discussions led by our Keynotes.

The conference will be held on the University of Windsor’s main campus for both days of the conference. Once we finalize our space reservation, we will send out another email noting the exact location.

Please check-in between 8:30am and 9:30am on Friday, October 21st. The conference will begin at 10am sharp.

What to Bring:

Information on your project to share with other conference goers, your passport (if you want to travel to Detroit), and a sense of curiosity. Also, feel free to bring cameras, audio, and video recorders to document the conference — we may want to include these on our website and in the pages of our Homework publication.

Transportation:

Getting to and from Windsor:

Driving is recommended if you have a vehicle and are within driving distance since Windsor is a ‘car-friendly’ town. However, there are several options besides driving:

-Windsor does have an airport, so you can fly into Windsor directly.

-From the US you can fly into Detroit and take a shuttle to Canada (check prices and availability first: http://www.courtesytransportation.com/)

-From anywhere in Canada you can also take to Via Rail, or Greyhound bus service to Windsor.

How to get around once you are here:

You can get around town by car, bicycle, or bus.

The Windsor Transit bus systems routes and schedules are available here:

http://www.citywindsor.ca/000600.asp

Car rental (inexpensive on weekends):

http://www.enterpriserentacar.ca/car_rental/deeplinkmap.do?gpbr=C111&bid=004&cnty=CA

Crossing the Border:

If you want to cross the border, you will need your passport. There is a tunnel bus that departs from Transit Windsor’s downtown terminal that’s quite convenient if you need / want to cross the border.

And finally, make sure you register to attend: http://www.brokencitylab.org/homework/attending-homework-is-free/

Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the University of Windsor’s School of Visual Arts, and our community partner the Art Gallery of Windsor.

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Keynotes Announced for Homework!

We are very pleased to announce our Keynote Speakers for Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices!

Gregory Sholette, Marisa Jahn, and Temporary Services (represented by Salem Collo-Julin) will join us on October 21 and 22, 2011 to deliver a keynote panel and round-table discussions.

There’s still time to register — and it’s free!

HOMEWORK: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively-written publication aimed at generating conversation around the following:

  • alternative infrastructures,
  • radical collaboration,
  • social practice,
  • art implicated in social change,
  • neighbourhood-level activities,
  • city-wide imaginations,
  • site-specific curiosities,
  • tactical resistance,
  • new models for art education and research.

Facilitated by Broken City Lab, HOMEWORK calls on artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, and doers interested in any of the above to join us in Windsor, Ontario on October 21 and October 22, 2011.

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). A graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA 1979), The University of California, San Diego (MFA 1995), and the Whitney Independent Studies Program in Critical Theory, his recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson for University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson for MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006, 2008), as well as a special issue of the journal Third Text co-edited with theorist Gene Ray on the theme “Whither Tactical Media.” Sholette recently completed the installation “Mole Light: God is Truth, Light his Shadow” for Plato’s Cave, Brooklyn, New York, and the collaborative project Imaginary Archive at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington New Zealand, and is currently working on an installation for the Queens Museum of Art, and the Tulca Arts Festival in Galway, Ireland. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College: City University of New York (CUNY), has taught classes at Harvard, The Cooper Union, and Colgate University, and teaches an annual seminar in theory and social practice for the CCC post-graduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design.

gregorysholette.com
darkmatterarchives.net

The editor of “Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices,”, Marisa Jahn is an artist, writer, and community organizer embedded in various social and economic justice groups since 2008. Her work has been presented at venues such as the MIT Museum, The Power Plant (Toronto), ICA Philadelphia, The National Fine Art Museum of Taiwan, New Museum (NYC), ISEA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Science, and more. A graduate of MIT and an artist in residence at MIT’s Media Lab, Jahn has been recognized as a leading educator by UNESCO and has been a CEC Artslink cultural fellow in Tajikistan, Estonia, and Russia. Her work has been written about in media such as The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Clamor, Punk Planet, Art in America, and Discovery Channel. In 2009, she co-founded REV-, an organization dedicated to socially-engaged art, design, and pedagogy; she is currently the Deputy Director at People’s Production House, a journalism training and production institute that works with low-wage workers, immigrants, and teens to produce groundbreaking news that has been seen and heard on BBC, ABC, PBS Newshour, Mother Jones, The Nation Magazine, The New York Times, and more.

marisajahn.com
rev-it.org
peoplesproductionhouse.org

Temporary Services is a group of three people: Brett Bloom (based in Copenhagen), Marc Fischer (based in Chicago), and Salem Collo-Julin (based in Philadelphia). They collaborate on producing projects, publications, events, and exhibitions. Making a distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to Temporary Services.

The group started as a storefront arts and events space in a working class neighborhood in Chicago in 1998. Since then, Temporary Services has been responsible for the publication of over 91 books and booklets (including 2003’s Prisoners’ Inventions and 2008’s Public Phenomena), and have created many projects in public and shared spaces, in spaces often dedicated to art and spaces often used for other things, and on the internet. Most recently, they participated in an exhibition on the Lower East Side organized by Creative Time. The members of Temporary Services founded Half Letter Press in 2008 as a experimental web store and publishing imprint in order to help support themselves and champion the work of others.

Salem Collo-Julin is a Chicago native. In addition to her work with Temporary Services, she writes, edits, and performs. She is a co-founder of The Free Store Chicago.

temporaryservices.org
halfletterpress.com
artandwork.us
http://thefreestorechicago.org/
halfletterpress.tumblr.com
publiccollectors.org
messhall.org
http://www.letsremake.info/
about.me/hollo

Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the University of Windsor’s School of Visual Arts, and our community partner the Art Gallery of Windsor.

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Attending Homework is Free!

HOMEWORK: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively-written publication aimed at generating conversation around the following:

  • alternative infrastructures,
  • radical collaboration,
  • social practice,
  • art implicated in social change,
  • neighbourhood-level activities,
  • city-wide imaginations,
  • site-specific curiosities,
  • tactical resistance,
  • new models for art education and research.

Facilitated by Broken City Lab, HOMEWORK calls on artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, and doers interested in any of the above to join us in Windsor, Ontario for the conference on October 21 and October 22, 2011.

Registration to attend the conference is free and by attending you will be participating in the creation of a collaboratively written publication of the proceedings from the conference.

REGISTER TO ATTEND THE HOMEWORK CONFERENCE BELOW:

Continue reading “Attending Homework is Free!”

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ATTC Calgary: Unfolding the Cycles of a City on Billboards & in Print

On the final day of our ATTC Calgary residency, the billboards launched. We headed out in the early afternoon with Randy to document them all.

Alongside highways, on the sides of buildings in the downtown core, and mixed in with other urban-fringe architecture. The billboards stood deeply embedded and clearly removed from the landscape, at times being rotated amongst advertisements, and in other instances, acting more directly as annotations to the site of installation.

As a final trajectory of ATTC Calgary, these billboards were installed around the city noting a series of cyclical narratives. Using the phrasing, “…and then the city…” each billboard features a different statement that referenced an overarching narrative or perhaps a brief moment in time about the city, read either internally or externally. These billboards are aimed at creating a space for a momentary discussion around the possibilities in narratives themselves, which is centred on one’s personal connection, history, and knowledge on the city.

In total, TRUCK had secured us seven billboard locations spread throughout Calgary, concentrated in the downtown core and in the city’s industrial edge.

Continue reading “ATTC Calgary: Unfolding the Cycles of a City on Billboards & in Print”

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ATTC Calgary: Projecting New Narratives of a City

Our work on ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project continued with a couple day’s break from events, allowing to focus on planning the remainder of our residency activities and starting work on our publication.

Tuesday night was our projection event around the edge of Central Memorial Park — an impeccably well-manicured green space in the middle of a downtown neighbourhood, and a welcomed surprise. A few logistical concerns aside (like having to connect seven extension cords to reach the edge of the park), we had a pretty ideal spot. A blank light-cemete wall always makes for a good projection screen.

The projections themselves were a series of text-based statements articulating of a set of narratives around Calgary that were originally based on the responses to our fill-in-the-blank statements and eventually moving on to real-time feedback and participation from those community members in attendance.

Continue reading “ATTC Calgary: Projecting New Narratives of a City”

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ATTC Calgary Day 3 & 4: the Tales & Timelines of a City

On Day 3 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, it rained, and so we planned. We planned and discussed and reviewed some of the answers we had received from our activities on Day 2 — glimpses of the state of Calgary, from a ground-level perspective.

For Day 4, we had to condense our planned events into an single afternoon, collecting answers to a series of fill-in-the-blank statements and eventually creating a CAMPER-wide chalkboard to collect a timeline of Calgary.

Working to understand Calgary through these gestures provides insights to a city in between many things — a military fort and a sprawling urban centre, a longtime home and a temporary situation,the site of the first roadhouse and the place that Tim Hortons amalgamated with a small coffee shop, a celebrated Olympic site and the place of someone’s first concert. All of these experiences, memories, and invented histories create a space for dialogue around the narratives that create the social shape of the city and not only how we interact with it, but how we interact with one another.

Continue reading “ATTC Calgary Day 3 & 4: the Tales & Timelines of a City”

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ATTC Calgary Day 2: Stories of a Distanced City

On Day 2 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, our ongoing work finds us asking questions about a city that we’re still just getting to know.

The questions are, necessarily, basic and straight forward. We’re not conducting deep sociological or statistical research, but rather trying to tease out a series of narratives that we know we haven’t yet heard about this place. Over the course of the residency, we’re aiming to develop a practice, a series of tactics that aim to unfold a way to get to know a place and the things that go about shaping the things we can know about a place. Cities are continually enacted through the narratives that we hear, create, and tear apart through daily practice, and we’re interested in both the narratives and that daily practice.

Over the course of a few hours on Thursday afternoon, we hear about many parts of the city that are worth loving, and worth changing. Somehow, an impression is made upon us that aligns with what we felt during our algorithmic walk — that is, Calgary is a city that isn’t readily touchable. It feels distant even when it’s right in front of you, and somehow the things we heard about the city from lifelong residents and people on holiday were the things that are legible from a distance, but in some instances, distanced from lived experience.

Continue reading “ATTC Calgary Day 2: Stories of a Distanced City”

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ATTC Calgary Day 1: Shortcuts for Urban Resistance & Algorithmic Walks

We’re in Calgary working with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, doing a residency based on our “…and then the city…” (ATTC) research. Developed after a six-month community research project back in Windsor called, Save the City, ATTC was initially realized as two billboards in Windsor and an accompanying publication that looked at the cyclical nature of city narratives — the things that we’re told and the things we tell ourselves about the places we live.

We’re here for 10 days working to develop a practice that can begin to unfold the complexities of Calgary and how the people, architecture, infrastructure, planning policies, and connections shape this city. We’re interested in the largest sense in understanding locality in both its reading and practice, and Calgary is already proving to be a wonderfully curious research site.

If you’re in Calgary, you can catch us at CAMPER by taking a look at our schedule, and if you’re away, you can expect posts everyday on our process.

Continue reading “ATTC Calgary Day 1: Shortcuts for Urban Resistance & Algorithmic Walks”

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Urban Discovery in Calgary with Truck’s CAMPER

We’re in Calgary for 9 days as part of Truck Gallery’s CAMPER 2011 Urban Discovery Project.

Here’s what’s going to be keeping us busy for the next week:

July 21 (Thurs): CAMPER Day 1: Exploding Calgary (interviews & storytelling) (12pm-3pm) 222 8 Avenue SW

July 22 (Fri): CAMPER Day 2: Spatial & Temporal Narratives of Calgary (public mapping) (3pm-7pm) 222 8 Avenue SW

July 23 (Sat): CAMPER Day 3: DIY Publication Workshop, Planning & Making Day (10am-2:30pm) 222 8 Avenue SW

July 25 (Mon): Map Making & Distro (various small maps created and distributed)

July 26 (Tues): Projection Night (Tweets & Transcripts from Citywide encounters projected from CAMPER) (9:30pm-11pm) Central Memorial Park

July 27 (Wed): CAMPER Day 4: Finding “Urban sophistication and warm western hospitality” (10am-1pm) Central Memorial Park

July 28 (Thurs): “…and then the city” publication launch (7pm) Central Memorial Park

We’re basing all of this activity off an extension of our “…and then the city” project to unfold and uncover the multiple narratives that go into shaping locality and our experience of it.  If you’re in Calgary, stop by. If you’re not, check back each day, we’ll be making epic posts.

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A Look at Process: building for CAFKA & designing for HFBC

We’re playing catchup. Between vacations, short hiatuses, and our summer schedules, we’ve been busy. However, getting back together, working together again on a more regular basis, and starting up on these projects again has been so great and incredibly rewarding. Our to-do list above is a small start to all of the projects we have on the go.

We’re working to finish up our How to Forget the Border Completely research publication (if you want to participate, check out our micro-grant), we’re planning the logistics of Homework (consider attending!), and we’re in the early stages of the final build for CAFKA.

Continue reading “A Look at Process: building for CAFKA & designing for HFBC”