Thinking mostly about the Ambassador Bridge, but generally about any overhead infrastructure, and wondering if limiting our larger hopes for roof-based painted messages is potentially ignoring a great opportunity for other messages.
Maybe we should consider pedestrian traffic more often.
[via Pasta & Vinegar]
We’ll be taking over 406 Pelissier from June 8th-28th and setting up a consultancy to research, investigate, and imagine alternative uses for the entire parking structure located at the corner of Park and Pelissier. Invented studies, statistics, and illustrations will be exhibited and will result in a formal report / action plan for future initiatives in Windsor’s downtown core.
Along with Julie Sando’s Contemporary Visual Culture class show, CVC Citizen Show (running at 424 Pelissier), we’ll have a reception of sorts on June 11th, from 8-11pm in both spaces.
We’ll be working in the space (406 Pelissier) off and on throughout the month.
We finished putting soil and seeds into the magnetic planters and set them on a sunny window ledge to start germinating. We figured the planters would stand a better chance at surviving (and staying in place longer than just overnight) if there were some wildflowers starting to grow.
We also went to the downtown space and started brainstorming, but I’ll make another post on that later.
Danielle and I picked up 84 of the Text In-Transit panels back from the printers today. We didn’t even open up the packages though, hoping to save the surprise for when we actually get to install them.
We are excited!
Pay to Rest by Vinchen is a simple-enough intervention, adding a suggestive coin-operated mechanism to a city bench.
It may be a one-liner, but it caught my eye a couple days ago, the photo sat on my desktop, and now this morning upon reading Amherstburg’s idea to introduce pay-per-use fees to soccer fields, baseball diamonds, etc., it made me curious about the priorities of a city when such significant money can go into certain forms of maintenance, but then shift other services to another kind of access model.
I’ll admit I’m making a bit of a leap here, but if benches were indeed pay-per-use, would it result in better kept parks? If an entire city shifted to a pay-per-use model, would things get any better? What would be the first bit of infrastructure to collapse? If the entire city operated on a subscription service model, would there be any positive change?
[via Wooster Collective]
As part of the Eyebeam OpenLab residency program, Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley have been working on a project called, Window Farms. Fashioned out of recycled and/or low-cost materials, the project calls for vertical gardens that use hydroponics to grow beans, tomatoes, and lettuce.
Designed with crowdsourcing and R&DIY (Research & Do-It-Yourself) in mind, the project is not meant to create a one-size fits all product, but rather a framework to further develop and refine the process. If urban agriculture is one the many necessary steps we’ll have to take to create sustainable cities, this is one way in which food production can be managed at a household or neighbourhood scale.
Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, June 5th at 2:30pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll be going on a brief field trip to the downtown space and continuing work on the planters.
Leesa Bringas (along with some fellow Windsor artists) spent the weekend braiding the long grass at Great Western Park. The process leaves spirals of braided grass around shoots of flowers. It’s quite beautiful and seems meditative (though admittedly, I didn’t venture out to try myself).
Political issues of the strike aside, I quite like seeing the riverfront in a naturalized state, and it’s great that Leesa found such a quiet way to work with the space. Given the other activity in city parks over the weekend, this project is a welcomed intervention to the strike now going into its seventh week.
You can see more photos on Steven’s site, or more video on Darren’s site, or read more about the project on the Windsor Star.
Friday afternoon turned out to be more productive than I thought it would. We finished embedding all the magnets we have, which means we have 25 planters either done or drying and ended up with 3 installed on various surfaces to see if they survive the rain this weekend.
If they turn out, I’ll order some more magnets, but in the meantime we’re still working on stencils (the BCL stencil above was just a test), and we should be able to get the rest up in the next week!
Owen over at Windsor Visuals also already made a great post on Friday’s Office Hours, and some of his photos are included in this post as well.
Scott Wayne Indiana set out on Memorial Day to map out the floor plan of his childhood home to try to coax some memories from the space.
Using public space for a large-scale mapping project might be an interesting way to work with some of the long grass around the city. Of course, putting something like masking tape down would be lost, but making paths by walking through the grass might be a different way of thinking about it. I want to spend more time outside soon.
[via Wooster Collective]