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How we use this site for research (in-part)

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Over the last week or so, we’ve added a few new things to our little website here. It’s funny because there’s a lot of research that goes on in the background, in terms of things we come across and don’t blog about, ideas that we email to one another, and documenting our process and posting it alongside that of other people’s works, which at times just sort of goes into the background archive.

Speaking with Tom Lucier earlier this week made us realize the distance between our blog-based practice and what we do in real space. That is, how we continually try to use the tools available to us online to communicate and network and collect information, and then the at times lo-tech initiatives we work with on an ongoing basis. Certainly there are times when these cross, but it just got me thinking about how important it is (at least from our perspective) to continue to keep the conversation going (at least amongst ourselves) online and continue to share what we’re reading and looking at during all that time in the week that we don’t get to get together.

So, I thought I’d make a quick post on some of the things I’ve added to the site as of earlier this week. In the right-most column, just past the contact information, there are now thumbnails of our most-recent posts on our research, there’s a series of links to bookmarks from my delicious page, and then there’s the links to the starred items from my Google Reader … with those kinks worked out, we’re going to try to plug-in feeds from other BCL research fellows when available.

Sometimes it’s difficult to find the time to post more than a few times a week, but I know I’m continually trying to make myself notes and links to things that might relate to an idea I had, or a note about something I should revisit when I have more time. For me, seeing all of these things in one place is helpful and to have it alongside all of the other things we’re continuing to talk about just seemed to make sense.

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Spencer Finch: The River That Flows Both Ways

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIjV5yBxbLc&feature=player_embedded

Inspired by the Hudson River, The River That Flows Both Ways is a project by Spencer Finch that documents a 700-minute (11 hours, 40 minutes) journey on the river in a single day.

On June 12, 2008, from a tugboat drifting on Manhattan’s west side and past the High Line, Finch photographed the river’s surface once every minute. The color of each pane of glass was based on a single pixel point in each photograph and arranged chronologically in the tunnel’s existing steel mullions. Time is translated into a grid, reading from left to right and top to bottom, capturing the varied reflective and translucent conditions of the water’s surface.

Much of Finch’s work relies on scientific, or at least methodological process, to re-present natural occurrences or phenomenon. I really enjoy the processes involved in his work and his continuing translation of information and data, or at times, the failure thereof.

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Commanding: Urban Signs

Commanding

Commanding is a group of artists/educators/students at NYU who hope to create a dialogue about the changing environments in which they live.

They post signs based on simple computer commands that relate directly to the gentrification, development and hopefully preservation of the neighborhoods that we interact with everyday.

A really basic idea, but quite effective to comment and critique, again another quiet project.

[via Make]

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Little People: Tiny Street Art

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Little People is a project by Slinkachu, a street artist based out of London. The works are often (literally) little scenarios ranging between the fantastic and the banal.

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These images in particular are from a recent installation entitled, What brings us together and what keeps us apart, in Grottaglie, Italy, which was part of the Fame Festival. A lot of the work is pretty humourous and I’d imagine nearly impossible to accidentally stumble upon.

Given that we’ve been discussing some potentially quieter projects, I thought it would be worth noting this one, given just how quiet it is.

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Monday Night Research: Lightbulbs & Lists

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We spent another Monday night at BCL HQ planning out this Windsor-Detroit hyper-local tourism idea and doing some basic research for another upcoming project.

We all have some homework to do, but things are moving along nicely on a number of projects, and with the semester winding down, things should be able to push ahead soon!

More pictures of research involving lightbulbs and lists after the jump.

Continue reading “Monday Night Research: Lightbulbs & Lists”

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Marc Owens’ Avatar Machine

I saw this project in one of its earlier iterations and had kind of lost track of it, but I was recently reminded of it through a Tweet fromDoug Coupland (he had referred to another project on the same page).

Avatar Machine by Marc Owens is a wearable system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface. The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.

Watching the video is a kind of surreal experience—I’m not really a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but the aesthetic created through this system really works to generate the same look and feel of movement in a game that uses this behind-the-head perspective. I thought it was worth noting just as a way of changing perspective, and working to change physical perspectives into a new kind of experience.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Paying for Art with Billboards

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Beautiful City is a new campaign based out of Toronto that is trying to persuade the city to create a tax for billboards that would do the following:

  1. A historical 53% increase to the annual municipal funding available to all artists, festivals and arts institutions,
  2. Close to $100 000.00 dollars for public realm improvement for each Toronto ward, every year — for projects such as greening,
  3. Almost a 1/3 of a million dollars for each of the 13 priority neighbourhoods to fund accessible youth arts programming, and
  4. Hiring 17 dedicated officers to enforce the new billboard bylaw.

The premise of the campaign is that billboard advertising, unlike all other forms of advertising, provides no content to the public in exchange for taking up public space (editorial to advertising ratios for TV is 75/25, for print is usually 50/50 but for billboards is 0 to 100).

Sounds like a fairly genius idea. What other ways could we think of generating new revenue for arts organizations in the city, given the likely continuing or eventual decline of funding for the arts in the city?

[via View on Canadian Art / image of Three Billboards About Love by Peter Fuss]

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Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day

Pierre Huyghe's Streamside Day

I was watching Season 4 of Art21 today and was reminded of this work by Pierre Huyghe, who creates films, installations, interventions, and public events.

Streamside Day was a work in which Huyghe scripted a celebration for a small town named Streamside, which included costumes, deserts, songs, speeches, parades, and decorations. You can read more about the project in the interview, and there’s also a video there of the project.

So, I have to wonder, when will we begin our plans for a Windsor-based parade? A “Windsor Day”, a celebration of everything that makes this city what it is (which will by definition have to include the numerous things wrong with the city), a parade with small floats, inflatable sculptures, and marching bands. We’ve talked about it before, maybe we should plan one for next summer.

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The International Hyper-local Exchange

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Monday night we met with some new friends from Detroit and had an amazingly good conversation about some of the very specific differences between our two cities. Maybe unsurprisingly, much of what we perceive about each other’s cities isn’t entirely correct, and it is exactly those strange assumptions about these two border cities that continue to make us interested in working on cross-border projects.

So, the idea is still fresh, but we’re imagining a route of travel based on the existing public transit infrastructure that can make it much less daunting to move between these two cities and experience what both of them have to offer on a more regular basis. We’re going to start charting these potential routes based on exact schedules of the bus systems in both Windsor and Detroit, to simplify the process of making the cross-border trek.

We’re also imagining greeting committees on both sides of the border and we anticipate eventually making these routes an open kind of thing, wherein if you wanted to head to Detroit from Windsor on a Saturday you would know the exact bus lines and their arrival / departure times at a number of destinations (good restaurants, cafés, interesting architecture), and maybe you might even catch up with other folks on the same adventure.

It’s about looking at this area under different terms. We’ve often talked about just how local Detroit is to Windsor, given its proximity, and yet crossing the border can still seem to be a daunting task for a variety of reasons. So, instead of talking about that locality, what if we thought about the many other places we might travel on a regular basis. Often, when traveling, you have someone to meet you on the other side of the car ride or plane trip and it’s that relationship that can often making traveling a lot easier. So, if you had someone to meet you on the other side of the Detroit River, maybe it might make that bit of travel easier as well.