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Tools in Forgetting the Border

Part of our research for How to Forget the Border Completely is going to come from a lot of video. We’re not sure how many interviews we’ll do or exactly where we’ll be shooting, but we wanted to be prepared. I’ve had a Canon T2i for over a year now and it’s a very solid camera. I originally picked it up because of its video capabilities (specifically, the 24p option), but I hadn’t really made much time to shoot anything.

So, while HFBC seemed like the perfect opportunity to start, I also knew we needed to upgrade things a bit. I read about the Magic Lantern firmware hack a little while ago and finally got around to installing it — more in a bit on that — and with the advice from Karlyn‘s partner, John, I also picked up a Rode VideoMic and Zoom H1 for audio.

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New Friends Across the Border: Visiting 555

Yesterday, Lee Rodney (Research Director of the Border Bookmobile) and I headed on a short 4km journey.

We visited the fine folks at 555, a volunteer artist-run arts organization providing affordable studios and workspace, gallery space, exhibition programs, arts education programs, and an artist in residency program. We met at their temporary location, while they await the renovations of their new space down the road (the former 3rd police precinct). Those A and B markers in the map above — that’s how close their new building is to the School of Visual Arts.

We met with Monte, Erin, Elizabeth, and Carl, discussing possible collaborations in the not-so-distant future, as well as spending a good amount of time understanding why they do what they do. The scale and type of efforts are perhaps different than those of say, the Powerhouse Project, or the Imagination Station, but their decisions are based on some of the same ideals (and certainly with the same enthusiasm as our own), how do you build a climate of social, aesthetic and community-based investment here and now?

Their programming and artist residencies offer incredibly engaging opportunities for the community and visiting artists, and perhaps most compellingly, they focus on ensuring that “data” created in Detroit can also give back to Detroit.

We’ll be inviting them over soon, you’ll get to meet them and get inspired too, don’t worry.

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Nicole Lavelle’s Lovely Projects: Be Okay + Neighbourhood Flags

Lovely text-based work. It’d be great to randomly run into this!!

As Nicole puts it:

This piece was an experiment in context, engagement and language. Uh, actually, what I mean is: I wanted people to see these phrases in interesting contexts and engage on an emotional level with the words I had chosen. This piece was also about my grandmother dying.

Materials: xerox, colored paper, thumbtacks, paper coffee cups, xerox transfer, manilla envelopes, cellophane bags, staples.

Nicole was also commissioned by GOOD to design a neighbourhood flag — great idea, right?!

Gorgeous work all-around. She’s also designing materials for Open Engagement 2011!!!

Spend some time checking out all her work — book design, typography, you know, making stuff and doing things. Very specific aesthetic choices, but fun reference for our (imaginary) future publications.

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Required Reading: A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible

A great downloaded book/PDF is available over at Half Letter Press. A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination presents a very accessible and readable overview and introduction to the history of art+activism based practices.

Well worth the half-hour or so that it will take to read through it.

The ending, which will particularly resonate with Danielle, I’m sure:

Creative resistance is not simply about designing glitzy visual stunts that the media will pick up on, it’s a lot more than that, it’s about making things that work, fashioning situations that both disrupt the mechanisms of power and show us our own power, our own potential to connect and create. The beauty is in its efficient use, and nothing is more beautiful than winning.

via Half Letter Press

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First Friday of 2011: Back in Action!!!

Our first Friday back was great. Unfortunately, Rosina couldn’t make it, but everyone else was around the table for the first time in almost a month. We’ve learned some things about how we work together over the last two and a half years, and we’re set to make more things happen this year than ever before.

There are some major production projects on our to-do list in 2011, but we’re also going to be undertaking a large research-based project in the first half of the year. So, to try to keep track of all of this activity, we’re going to be trying to shift more of our ongoing conversations onto our blog, likely filed under the Notes section. It’s going to act as our collective sketchbook, messaging system, and basically catch-all. Having tried Google Wave last year around this time, Google Docs, and plain old email, we’re hoping that this will keep things flowing back and forth between everyone at a much faster pace. Meeting all together for a two or three hours once a week makes it tough to get through much more than just figuring out what we should be doing.

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This Probably Isn’t Helping: When Gateways Fail

Physical civic improvements are an important step for Windsor. Our gateways, if you’re unfamiliar with the city, are a bit lack-luster at present. Where gateways do exist, the markers are underdeveloped, poorly executed, and are the kind of “this could literally be anywhere” design strategy.

Why do gateways matter? Physically and visually defining space is crucial to understanding where you are, and if gateways are to be the entrance to a city, they need to clearly enunciate where you are, and one might argue that this should denote a certain specificity. Failing at gateways means failing to define a space appropriately and in turn continuing to fail at getting over the “non-place” hump.

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Leddy Library adds American periodicals to electronic collection

Likely very helpful for some aspects of HFBC… wonder if there’s an equivalent to the Windsor Star for this kind of access.

Detroit Free Press, 1831-1922

The Detroit Free Press published its first edition before Michigan entered statehood and when wild animals outnumbered the people living in the city. Its editor assigned a writer to walk the waterfront and record the shipping news each day, creating the first news “beat.” The Free Press also was the first U.S. newspaper to print a regular Sunday edition and the first to publish court testimony.

via Daily News.

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The Knitted Mile

The Knitted Mile by Robyn Mile. Something interesting about the idea of deliberate and slow labour and what it means as a process. Long-term projects always make me wish for more time.

The Knitted Mile was commissioned as part of an exhibition titled Gestures of Resistance: Craft and The Politics of Slowness (curated by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leeman) that happened in conjunction with the College Art Association 2008 conference in Dallas, TX.

Ninety knitters from around North America contributed pieces of TKM. Photographs of each knitter working on their section were included as part of the piece when it was removed from the road and installed in the gallery, Grey Matter.

TKM also was exhibited at PS.122 as part of the exhibition Yarn Theory, curated by Martha Lewis.

You should also check out some of Robyn’s other huge works.

via Saint Flamingo’s twitter

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Anxious to Explore the Border Bookmobile’s Winter Reading Room

I stopped by the Ecohouse today (where our collective studio is housed) to check out one of our new neighbours — The Border Bookmobile Winter Reading Room. Collected and curated by Border Bookmobile founder, Lee Rodney, the books assembled as part of the winter reading room are going to be incredible helpful for our upcoming How to Forget the Border Completely research project.

I did a quick tour of the collection, though I anticipate that we’ll all be getting a lot better acquainted in the coming weeks.

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