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Creative Cities Summit: Using Art to Change Cities in Lexington, Kentucky

In just a couple days, Danielle and I will be headed down to Lexington, Kentucky, where I’ll be presenting at this year’s Creative Cities Summit as part of the Using Art to Change Cities panel. The summit runs from April 7 – 9, 2010, I’ll be presenting on Friday, April 9th.

Here’s the panel description (good fit, no?):

Most cities support traditional notions of arts and culture, the symphony, opera, ballet and museums. Beyond those traditional bastions of culture there are artists and entrepreneurs that are actively using art to change their communities for the better. Public art is more than just the statue in front of the building and can be beautifully integrated into projects for startling results. Guerrilla art interventions, some legal, some illegal, can provoke dialog and action where before there was gridlock. And art can be used to change our very notions of fundamental things like healthcare and education to astounding results. This eclectic panel will attack this issue from their unique perspectives and is not the traditional arts and cultural conversation.

I’m so excited to get to be a part of this conversation and Danielle and I are both anxious to hear more about other cities and how they’re responding (or not) to the idea of becoming a creative city. Complex and holistic problem-solving seems to be at the foundation of what this conference wants to address — we’re hoping to learn a lot.

Did you make it to Detroit’s edition back in 2008?

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Parsing RSS Feeds for the Arduino + LCD + PHP project

I’ve made some really great progress on this ongoing Arduino + LCD project over the last couple of weeks — some of the two larger hurdles are now out of the way, the results of which you can see in the video above.

Since the video was shot, I’ve improved the PHP script some more to ensure that the text is properly broken up over the appropriate lines on the LCD and I’ve also removed those strange characters, which were resulting from newlines in the Twitter RSS feed, I think.

Continue reading “Parsing RSS Feeds for the Arduino + LCD + PHP project”

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Things Worth Saving

The details: Sunday, April 11th via email & Tuesday, April 27th at 7pm, at Artspeak Gallery.

As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab is inviting Windsorites to venture out into the city and take five photographs that showcase what makes our city “worth saving.” These photographs will be turned into a series of postcards that will be mailed out to other cities across the country to prompt a discussion around the differences between how Windsor is viewed by its residents versus how Windsor is viewed by people from outside the city.

Please submit your photographic responses to the following criteria in landscape orientation (your images should be wider than they are taller):

1) Someone you’d hate to see leave
2) Something inspiring
3) Somewhere that made you feel something important
4) Somewhere you know you’ll always find a familiar face
5) Something with potential

Once you’ve captured your images of “things worth saving,” please submit all five to thingsworthsaving@brokencitylab.org by 11:59pm on Sunday, April 11th, 2010. Your submissions will be turned into a series of postcards, so please only submit photographs that you are willing to send out into the world.

Then on April 27th at 7pm, Broken City Lab will host a massive mailout / postcard writing party, at Artspeak Gallery, located at 1942 Wyandotte Street East, where you’re invited to help address all of those postcards and write personalized messages to the rest of the country!

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Micro-Residency #4: Iga Janik

Iga Janik is an artist, curator, and the director of Artspace in Peterborough. We got to hang out with her back in October for about a week. It was awesome, and now we get to hang out again, but this time, in Windsor.

For her Micro-Residency, Iga will be bringing some micro radio transmitters, which you can see above.  We’re not sure what she’ll do with them over the course of the weekend, but their signals can be picked up by car radios, and hanging out in a parking lot or bugging a city block could be a lot of fun.

However, for Iga, the important part of all of this is what transmitters can do, not how they do it. Consider us very excited!!!

If you want to catch up with Iga, send us a note, we’ll get you connected.

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We Sang to the Streets!

We had an incredible turnout for Sing to the Streets. The response was overwhelming, and despite the cold, we managed to get a great overview of some of the folkloric history of Windsor and Detroit and learn some Francophone folks songs along the way.

The Save the City project is really giving us a lot of insight into the things that make Windsor the city that it is — hyper-localized pronunciations and all. That idea, in particular, spurred a 2-hour conversation on a local radio station, and a great article in the Windsor Star on Monday, which was just a bonus after being able to spend the afternoon immersed in folklore and great company.

We’re a little over halfway through the Save the City project, but there’s still a lot more to come, so if you’ve been meaning to come out, but haven’t had the chance yet, check back soon, as we’ll be posting the date for April’s event any day now.

Continue reading “We Sang to the Streets!”

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Working on the PHP Backend of the Arduino + LCD Project

I haven’t posted for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on the ongoing Arduino + LCD project, which is moving along towards connecting external data to be displayed on the LCD screen.

The last bit of time I’ve put into the project has been focused on printing text to the LCD screen from a text file. It’s an easy enough process using a PHP serial class that I mentioned in the last post, combined with PHP’s basic file manipulation functions.

Continue reading “Working on the PHP Backend of the Arduino + LCD Project”

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Imagining Borders in Other Places

Friday night meetings have been hard to pull together over the last little while. Managing to fit together six different schedules can seem next to impossible sometimes, so it’s all the more fun when we can actually pull it off and all be in the same room at the same time.

We caught up on the recently launched Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, the upcoming Save the City event, and some ideas for the proposal we’re hoping to put together for CAFKA.

Josh and Rosina had been working on some ideas for our proposal, the idea of looking at the border-zone, so to speak, between Kitchener and Waterloo. They had been looking up the role of embassies.

Continue reading “Imagining Borders in Other Places”

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72 Hours: A Block Rebellion

72 Hours is an audiovisual intervention comprised of a series of video projections evoking the personal histories of neighborhood residents, which will be seen through the building’s windows, and one unit will be opened to the public for a walk-through sound installation that evokes lives of former owners. You can see some of the projections above, as installed in a gallery.

The houses in question, clustered together in the space of a city block, are owned by Deutsche Bank and other international banks. During the Block Rebellion, demands will be made to immediately cease all no-fault post-foreclosure evictions and begin negotiations to sell back the vacant units at real value.

According to the artist, John Hulsey, “the projections serve as injunctions, insertions into contested areas of the city. Transforming private neighborhoods into public arenas for debate, the projections may create spaces in which dialogue can be breached.”

It’s an interesting project, makes me wonder about the possibilities for Grace Hospital — certainly, a different set of issues, but at the very least, this is an interesting example of highlighting contentious spaces.

[via Groundswell Collective]

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Call for Proposals: The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation

The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation invites the radical re-imagining of the possibilities for economic stimulus and process-driven practice, situating those very possibilities in the heart of Windsor in vacant storefronts.

Facilitated by Broken City Lab, the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation will call on artists, writers, designers, entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, hobby shops, restauranteurs, librarians, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010.

The residencies will attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a population of people who are continually losing hope for their city.

Details: We will provide a space for you to use, some very modest fees and resources to pull off your project, and a lot of enthusiasm. While we are open to proposals from anyone, preference will be given to Ontario-based persons. If you’re an artist working in a socially-engaged practice, we’d be especially interested to hear from you. Any questions: info@brokencitylab.org.

Deadline: April 15, 2010

The residencies will take place here in Windsor, Ontario in June and July 2010.

Please use the form below to make your proposal.

P.S. You don’t need to write a 20-page proposal, but give us the details that are most pertinent. It would be really helpful to know how long you’d like to use the space, what your activity or project will look like, how you think it’s innovative, and why you think it could do some good in our fair city.

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Submissions are now closed.

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This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.