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Bureau for Open Culture: DESCENT TO REVOLUTION

Audible Dwelling by Learning Site

Descent to Revolution, and exhibition / residency created by the Bureau for Open Culture, features five international artist collectives and collaboratives that use urban spaces and social spheres as means of production and inspiration. During the course of the exhibition, participating artists visit Columbus in a series of residencies to make projects specific to the city. The work does not take place inside the space of the gallery but in concert with community and physical mediums outside of it.

Contributing to the exhibition is Claire Fontaine, Learning Site, Red76, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, and Tercerunquinto, and all will be working within some relation of the city of Columbus and its community.

Pictured above is Audible Dwelling by Learning Site, a combination loudspeaker and dwelling that responds, in part, to the proliferation of abandoned malls, parking lots, and housing in downtown Columbus. Audible Dwelling is situated in a parking lot on CCAD’s campus. During their dates of residency visitors follow the arrows on the floor out the gallery door to visit Audible Dwelling, to experience it by listening and by leaving a story that is eventually projected into public space via loudspeaker.

Will there by time for a road trip to Columbus???

This project is really exciting to see for a number of reasons, maybe the top one being that it’s nearly exactly what I wish we could do… I wish we had the money to do something as large-scale as this, or even money just to pay for materials for projects we’d like to realize through a program like this. For now though, our Micro-Residency project is getting some great submissions, and hopefully we’ll be kicking it off in the next few weeks, and doing a bunch of amazing things for free.

[via Art&Education mailing list]

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Juxtaposing Windsor’s Auto Plants with Toronto’s Streets

chyrslervstoronto

Consider this required reading: over at Spacing.ca, Shawn Micallef wrote about one his more recent trips to his former hometown, Windsor. Driving down Walker Road again after spending much of his time in Toronto walking, a lot, made him realize just how staggeringly huge these auto plants are, and he questions what we’re all wondering—what will happen when these plants entirely shut down?

Go, read it.

Thanks for passing this along, Rod.

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Projection Site for Another Project?

FAMFEST09-sm

I’ve been meaning to take a look at this location for a potential projection project that we’re looking into for Harvesting the F.A.M. The wall is dark brick, but we need to work out the logistics of projecting onto such a surface anyways for another project we’re working towards.

What exactly we’ll be projecting is still up the air, but we plan to be on the roof of Empire Lounge for an hour or so on one of the nights of the F.A.M. Fest. We’ll keep you posted.

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Field Tests & Exampling: Moving the Planters

IMG_4915

I hope you’ll forgive us for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been on a film shoot all day, everyday for the last few weeks, while other BCL folks have been traveling, moving, working, and studying, and so meeting even once a week has been a challenge. Thankfully, school is literally a couple days away and with it comes some kind of stability in a schedule.

However, we’ve still been trying to get some things done, mostly it’s been this planters project and planning for our upcoming event, Welcome to the Neighbourhood. On Thursday, we did some more field tests with our planters where we’re discovering which plants have been doing better and trying to determine why.

Continue reading “Field Tests & Exampling: Moving the Planters”

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Welcome to the Neighbourhood

Welcome to the Neighbourhood

We’re hosting an algorithmic adventure to get to know our new neighbourhood. This adventure will be a psychogeographic walk of sorts starting at Broken City Lab Headquarters, which will take participants around the campus, student ghettos, the sculpture garden, Indian Road, and all of the little things that make this area worth exploring.

Everyone who shows up will get into small groups and share a list of instructions that will take them around the neighbourhood. These instructions will involve moving in specific directions, taking on specific tasks, and generally paying specific attention to the area around you. At each step in the algorithm, you’ll be asked to take a single photograph. At the end of the algorithm, when you return to BCL HQ, we’ll download your photos and upload them to our site to create a set of very specific views of the neighbourhood and generate a body of research on West Windsor much greater than we could ever do on our own.

This event will launch our fall activities and be the first of many open-house type events / workshops / office hours for 2009 / 2010!!!

The details:

Monday, September 14, 2009

Start at 362 California Ave at 7pm

End at 362 California Ave around 9pm

Bring your camera and bring a friend!

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Saying Something with Banners

Everything Must Go!

Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen are working on a series of text banners / posters. Sometimes the banners are held between the two of them, other times they each hold smaller cards with texts that work off of one another. Sometimes they write the text on the banners, other times they invite others to compose it.

They’re fans of reading, typography, and from what I gather, lists.

Oh, the things that could be said with banners here—we should get on that.

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LANDREFORM Carousel

LANDREFORM Carousel

In a vacant lot of downtown real estate in Berlin, eight BMWs drove around in a perfect circle roped together like a carousel, while “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie is playing on their radios – remixed for an amusement ride sensation. Every couple rounds the drivers systematically stop to pick-up and drop-off spectators and riders. Just before dusk, a fire is lit inside the circle.

The project, which was part of the 5th Berlin Biennial and sponsored by BMW put the sponsorship and the spectators themselves on display in a lot destined for more high-end development.

Maybe the reverse of this—that is, rusting and broken down domestic cars being pushed in a circle on a vacant lot in the west-end, might be fun … or even more offensive.

[via vvork]

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Seed Bombs in PEI with DodoLab

dodolab-pei

Andrew Hunter’s DodoLab, an experimental co-creative lab for engaging with communities, organizations and events, headed east last week to do a series of workshops and activities around Charlottetown’s ecology and environment.

Our schedules couldn’t align (again) so we missed an amazing trip to PEI, but DodoLab carried out a massive seed bomb workshop using our recipe and offered hundreds of seed bombs to the folks passing through the market!

Alongside the seed bombs, there were a number of other projects led by fellow DodoLab researchers and students from CHARTS that looked at landscape, the experimental farm, cartography, and the wire worm (a species that can decimate a potato crop).

So, while we missed another round of collaborative research opportunities, we’re looking into further collaborations between DodoLab and Broken City Lab, hopefully picking up later this fall or winter based a little closer to home.