Tuesday was all about research. We looked up some more details on ribbons and talked more about how we would move forward with the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event.
We’re also getting ready for Sunday’s event, Listen to the City (remember, 8pm at Phog), and for Thursday night’s projection performance at Propeller in Toronto.
Continue reading “Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events”
We’re participating in an upcoming exhibition entitled, Public Realm, at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto. For the exhibition we’re going to be doing some outdoor projection around the gallery, and we want to have your input!
We want to know what you think about the public realm, and about public and private space, and about what you can do in that space and maybe even, why you’d want to bother doing something in that space in the first place.
To participate, you can do one of two things …
Download this fillable PDF, fill it in and email it back to us, or fill in this form below:
[form 2 “Public Realm”]
We’re going to project all of the submissions we get on Thursday, January 21st, as part of the opening for the exhibition!
As we gear up for the first event of our Save the City project, Listen to the City, we’re also planning ahead for the February event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. Another Friday night at HQ trying our best to get as much work done as we could before heading out to the opening at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Continue reading “Already Looking Ahead to February’s Save the City Event!”
On Thursday, January 21st at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto, we’ll be doing a projection performance that examines the language and ideas surrounding public space, intervention, urban surfaces, and city infrastructures. As part of Propeller’s Public Realm exhibition, we will curate a text-based list of ideas, statements, and questions, that address the concerns embedded in our practice and that appear to be at the heart of the exhibition itself.
We will ask for the participation of those in attendance, along with other momentary collaborators through tools such as Twitter and SMS, for submissions during the duration of the performance. The projection itself will consist of white text and will be projected onto the façade of a nearby building. Photographic documentation of the projection will be installed in the gallery space afterwards.
Public Realm opens on January 20th and runs to January 31st, 2010.
Just a quick update…the LEDs in the freezer are still going strong, more than two days later, which is good news for any potential LED-embedded ice or snow project. The glow was way more exciting than this photo makes it appear, as I had assumed the battery wouldn’t have lasted this long at all.
Finally had the chance to pick up some more postcards, and yet continually finding myself not having them when I’m actually talking to people. Cristina picked up a bunch to distribute downtown, Josh went to Walkerville, Michelle went through campus, I’ve mostly been doing hand-offs.
Here’s the remaining pile — 250 goes pretty fast, but we need to get rid of them all by the 24th! We’re excited, hope you already have the date in your calendar!
It took a while. A little over a week I guess. However, it finally clicked — FAT Labs’ latest project #000000book is starting to make sense to me in terms of how big it could be.
Part of the problem may have been just the early overview of the project that circulated the blogs: #000000book is an open repository for sharing and archiving motion captured graffiti tags. Tags are saved as digital text files known as GML (Graffiti Markup Language), which can be captured through freely available software such as Graffiti Analyisis (marker), DustTag (iPhone), EyeWriter (eye movement) and Laser Tag (laser). Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data.
Robotagger: GML + ABB4400 from Golan Levin on Vimeo.
It just seemed to me, initially, that there would be this collection of tags that had been sort of digitized through an open platform, but I kind of thought, so what? But, I knew that it had to be kind of groundbreaking. Most of the projects that involve this mix of technology and graffiti that I’ve seen come out of GRL or FAT have been very, very cool, in the way that they think about mixing tactics and tools.
#000000book is no exception, as you can see above, Golan Levin hooked up a robotic arm to read from the GML database to reproduce a tag. We are in the future.
[via today and tomorrow]
Meeting twice in a week is awesome. I can’t say that enough. So much time makes us way more productive and makes it a lot easier to be OK with not having everyone there all the time.
First on the list, doing some really, really quick tests of the potential of embedding LEDs in ice or snow. We know, it’ll probably kill the battery and potentially the LEDs themselves, but we have some ideas that might make that worthwhile.
Continue reading “Snow, LEDs, Flights, Fill-in-the-blanks, Proofs, and Postcards”
The details: Sunday, January 24, 2010 (8pm) at Phog Lounge (157 University Ave W, Windsor)
As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab researchers will facilitate a community workshop to brainstorm, uncover, and share personal histories of Windsor, inviting a range of community members to participate in the process. The workshop will begin with a discussion about the importance in personal histories alongside official histories of a city, and then lead to the opportunity for community participants to share their own stories about Windsor.
Throughout this part of workshop, we are going to help you to record one another’s stories on portable MP3 audio recorders and encourage the retelling of stories throughout the workshop. After the workshop, the recorded audio stories will be uploaded to the Broken City Lab website and offered for streaming and downloading. As well, a copy of the edited collection of the stories will be donated to the Windsor Archives.
We think that the best way to start understanding this city is to hear the stories from the people who live here.
With that in mind, we’re going to ask you two questions about the city:
What brought you here? and Why are you still here?
See you on the 24th!!!!
Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
The Save the City project aims to create a concentrated series of positive community-based activities facilitated by Broken City Lab in collaboration with community members. The project will address a number of issues and ideas specific to Windsor, Ontario through various collaborative community-based activities. As Windsor is situated in precarious economic, cultural, and geographic positions, the Save the City project will serve as a much needed injection of positive collaboration, engagement, and dialogue with the city itself and its diverse communities.
The objectives of the Save the City project are to prompt and initiate creative solutions for social change within Windsor through direct connections between emerging artists and community members. Save the City will focus on the process of creative and artistic practice extending into the community and the everyday, selecting and inviting a range of collaborators and participants from within the many communities of the City of Windsor.
The Save the City project will bring together emerging artists and city residents to imagine and prompt creative social engagements and civic activation. Within the project’s series of five activities, the content of each activity will be based on a creative interaction with a part of Windsor’s current and historical social, economic, and regional culture.
Below is the schedule of events (with some details still to be announced):
January 24, 2010 – Listen to the City : Community storytelling workshop to brainstorm, uncover, and share your personal histories of Windsor (Phog Lounge, 157 University Ave W, 8PM)
February 28, 2010 – Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope : Social Mapping event of the places we need to apologize for and the place we need to care about (362 California Ave, 1PM)
March – Sing to the Streets : A celebratory parade of French history, singing French Folk songs to French Streets (meet at Pelissier and University)
April – Things Worth Saving : Help us to document the thousands of things worth saving in this city, we’ll turn them into free postcards to send out to other cities (362 California Ave)
May – How to Save a City : Community think tank / artist talk / open forum, asking how in the world do you save a place like Windsor (TBA)
Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
Meeting twice in a week can make such a difference in terms of how much we can get done. We’re still in the thick of planning for the first event of Save the City. We met earlier last week to go over the basics of finalizing our adjusted budget, put together the first round of promo, and just to sort of regroup after the holidays.
It also really helped to keep us from losing track of where we were, which seemed to be the case when we went a week (or sometimes more) between meetings. Certainly, it’s a bit more intensive, but it gave time and brain space to start talking about some larger ideas (about projects and our practice in general), and really helps to keep multi-tasking things moving.
It might seem like a lot of sitting around and talking and writing, but this is how we get things done!!!
Continue reading “How We Spend Friday Nights: Planning, Writing, and Mapping”