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Extended Field Trip Day 2: Mapping

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We spent the better part of Day 2 of our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at the wonderful Artspace talking to some new people, synthesizing some questions from our broad understanding of the city so far, and trying to get a sense of what if anything there is to change about this place.

We also explored some more of the downtown core on foot and discovered some really specific things about the city that are starting to add up and answer our questions about how it is that things seem okay here.

Mapping Peterborough, its residents’ feelings about it, and then comparing those maps of sorts to Windsor is revealing in helping us to understand the very specific view so many Windsorites have of our city. I’m not sure that we’ve been able to articulate this yet, maybe tomorrow when it’s not so late.

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Extended Field Trip Day 1: Stable City

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As part of our Extended Field Trip #001, we’re in Peterborough staying at the artist-run-centre, Artspace. We’re hoping to conduct some intercity research where we’ll attempt to understand the similarities and differences between Peterborough and Windsor and hopefully find some intersection thereof to which we can respond. We arrived in Peterborough in the late afternoon and did some exploring immediately. We’ll be posting more of our general observations and assumptions about why we saw what we saw later, but for now, we thought we’d give a visual introduction to this city.

Above, a path that follows the Otonabee River, which sits tucked away beyond the visual border of the downtown core. Somehow, this describes the general sense of Peterborough—nice, strangely well-maintained, and a place that just seems to work.

The city is considerably different than Windsor, and we’re hoping to figure out why it is that this city of 75,000 north of Toronto is a place that few people want to leave.

Basically, this post will present most of what we saw, much of which we’re still trying to reflect on and figure out. The discussion we had last night with some of the Artspace folks helped to frame and confirm what we saw—this place is okay and stable.

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Interface for our Text Projection Tool

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A few hours before we were set to do the 100 Ways to Save the City project, we decided we wanted to make it interactive in some way. I had gone ahead and put all of our ideas on how we might suggest saving the city into a nice Keynote presentation that we could easily play and have that project, but it really limited what the projection could be.

When it came down to actually figuring out how exactly to do this though, we were a bit unsure. There was nothing that I could think of that would do this fairly simple thing we wanted: input controls for basically just text on the laptop screen, and then displaying the resulting text on the projector. So, I went searching through old project files from Quartz Composer, Processing, and Max/MSP/Jitter.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked in any of those programs, and so I was a bit rusty. I knew that I had seen something like this before, and it seemed to me that somewhere I had already hacked together the exact thing we needed. I found the Max patch that detected the dominant colour in a video signal and then overlayed the word on the video (for example, Red), dynamically resizing the text depending on the intensity of that colour, which seemed hopeful, but ultimately didn’t have any manual input.

Finally, I found what I was looking for. It was based on a tutorial on Cycling74‘s website, meant to be dynamic subtitling or something like that. I downloaded the tutorial, changed what I needed and it worked for our performance. Since then, I’ve cleaned it up, got rid of the live video part we didn’t need and simplified the functionality. This was probably the first time that I was in a situation that proved Max/MSP/Jitter’s strengths—quick prototyping, troubleshooting, finessing that ca quickly lead to performance. If you have Max 5, you can download the patch, I’m not sure if it works with 4.6.

This might come in handy this week, depending on what we take on in Peterborough.

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Extended Field Trip #001: Artspace in Peterborough

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Broken City Lab is heading up to Peterborough, Ontario for all of next week (October 12 – 17, 2009) for an extended field trip to collaborate with Artspace for a series of community and inter-city research initiatives, workshops, and interventions to understand the city of Peterborough, its infrastructures, and its communities.

We’ll be blogging extensively on our activities and experiences, running our research hub / studio out of Artspace‘s main gallery. We’ll be following this nightly schedule, while also exploring, documenting, creating, and planning each day:

October 13, 14, 15, 16: “Open Office Hours” Ongoing Open Office Hours / Public Meetings / Workshops daily at 4-5:30pm

October 13: “Extended Field Trip: An Introduction to Our Social Practice” Opening Artist Talk / Overview of Research Plans for Peterborough at 7pm

October 14: “Get Lost: An Algorithmic Adventure with Strangers” Exploring the City and Getting to Know Neighbourhoods on Foot at 5pm

October 15: “Open Forum: On the City of Peterborough” Townhall Meeting / Community Discussion on the city of Peterborough at 7pm

October 16: “Home Work from an Extended Field Trip: Comparing notes on what to do with the city in 96 hours” Closing Performance / Activity at 7pm

If you’re in Peterborough or the area, here’s the address for Artspace: 3/378 Aylmer St. N. Peterborough, Ontario.

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New Project Mondays: Week 1

Broken City Lab: new project Mondays

Monday night we spent a couple hours working over some new ideas with some new friends. Mostly, these ideas have been in the “meaning to do that” category, mostly opening up new collaborations in which new projects will unfold.

Two main project frameworks came out of our brainstorm session—a floating sculpture project with the Green Corridor and a documentary video project with a local filmmaker. Both are ambitious in their own right, but thankfully operate at completely different timescales, allowing us a lot more time where we need it.

On top of being really productive and inspiring, we got to use a rainbow of sharpies to take notes—how much better can creative collaborative work get???

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100 Ways to Save the City Projection

Broken City Lab light projection in Windsor

As part of FAM Fest 09, we did a projection performance on the roof of Metro Cleaners accessed from Empire Lounge in downtown Windsor.

For about an hour and a half, we presented our 100 Ways to Save the City and then asked for ideas from the folks on the ground, at Phog, and on the Twitterverse.

After the jump, there’s 160-something photos from all the ideas that were projected on Saturday night.

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Beautiful Light by David Therrien

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorbould

4 LETTER WORD MACHINE is a giant illuminated computer-controlled / live performance text display by artist, David Therrien.

Recently exhibited at part of Nuit Blanche this past Saturday attached to Toronto’s city hall, the installation displays “the phenomema of light and electricity and the role of light in our belief systems, language, biology, natural world and cosmology – light as illumination, energy, information – and as a metaphor for good and evil.”

Guess how much I’d love to be able to work with something at this scale.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0cDE2g1QQs&feature=player_embedded

Ignore the music in this video, but watch the work come together in Scottsdale back in January 09.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Prepping for FAM Fest Projection

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Last night out a window in the county, the new projector at night.

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Today, finishing our list of 100 ways to save the city.

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It’s going to run as a presentation in Keynote, the easiest failsafe solution. Though, we might try to open it up on Twitter somehow later tonight.

Screen shot 2009-10-03 at 2.26.18 PM

And, speaking of tonight, the weather is looking good. No rain!!!! We’ll be projecting across from Phog, look up above Empire Lounge and you’ll see us. Tonight is marks Day 2 of FAM Fest, hope to see you out and about.

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Pike Loop: Architectural Fabrication

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Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler are using R-O-B, their Mobile Fabrication Unit robot, to New York to build Pike Loop, a 22m long structure built from bricks at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

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Positioned on the central mall on Pike Street, the robot will work for up to four weeks – in full view of the public – to construct a brick wall, a highly sculptural response to the specific identity of the site. For the Pike Loop installation, more than seven thousand bricks aggregate to form an infinite loop that weaves along the pedestrian island. In changing rhythms the loop lifts off the ground and intersects itself at its peaks.

Beyond awesome.

[via today and tomorrow]