For the month of June, Broken City Lab will have access to 406 Pelissier (pictured above) in downtown Windsor, thanks to Julie Sando and Leesa Bringas who are teaching the Contemporary Visual Culture class during Intersession at the University of Windsor.
We’re still just starting to plan what we might do in the space, but we’re thinking of running a type of consultancy for the month. Details to follow.
Huge, great exciting news!
Our project, Cross Border Communication, is a finalist for the 2010 Rhizome Commission!!!
If we’re successful in the ranking process, we could awarded the funds needed to make the project happen—that means, money to buy a projector powerful enough to make a message bright enough to be seen from downtown Detroit! This is the Rhizome Membership vote, which will award 2 commissions, while the jury will award 7 others. Winners will be announced in mid-June.
You love Windsor, don’t you? Well, show your Windsor Pride by putting this ringtone on your phone! The zip file has an iPhone-ready m4r file along with a standard mp3 file AND NOW a MIDI version for any other phone not mp3-enabled. Preview the 25 second ringtone below:
[audio:wonderfulwindsorRingtone.mp3]If we could get someone to re-compose this melody in MIDI (thank you to Derek Harrison for transcribing the tune to MIDI), I’d challenge the entire city to use this ringtone for a week. Credit goes to Steven for originally coming across this song some time ago. From what I was able to find out about this, it was a 1960s radio jingle that used to be played on CKWW. Maybe you could also use this aerial photo from Windsor / Detroit made sometime in the 1960s.
Broken City Lab office hours will continue throughout the summer, just on a different schedule. I’m teaching a section of the Green Corridor running through Intersession, and a number of other BCL members are taking other Intersession courses, which happen to fall on Tuesday and Thursday nights.
So, we won’t be holding Office Hours this week, but plan for a meeting next week. I’ll put up a post of the details on our next meeting as soon as we can figure out when to meet (though I’m thinking Fridays during the day)…
Thursday, May 14 going to be an incredible day: Urban Mediations, a one-day symposium on urban media studies is taking place in Windsor. Co-organized by the University of Windsor’s own, Dr. Michael Darroch, the symposium will involve a collection of researchers, artists, designers, and activists talking about what it means to research the urban.
I’ll be speaking on Broken City Lab, and Danielle will be talking about architecture of urban refugees, among many other fine thinkers, doers, and writers.
Andrew Hunter up at RENDER recently lead participants at the Oakridges Moraine For Life Community Well-being Symposium in a creative mapping project designed to identify the links and barriers to progressive change. The map, pictured above, highlights barriers and connectors by using different coloured post-its alongside more illustrative mapping techniques.
I thought this could be a particularly interesting way to think through larger scale projects.
The Magnetic Planters project continues. With Michelle and Danielle away this week, the rest of Broken City Lab had to relearn the process of making paper pulp. It was a good night, though we’re hoping to get this project finished in the next week or so. As Intersession begins, we’ll be shifting our Office Hours to another yet-to-be-determined day, and it might even be biweekly until July. We’ll keep you posted.
Frtiz Haeg is a difficult person to write about. That is, he has had some considerable press coverage over the last few years, much of which from the major TV networks casts him in a kind of strange “green” light, and whether he’s described as an artist, architect, gardener, or designer, Fritz Haeg (in practice) seems to dodge all of these titles. He’s not nearly as eloquent as Natalie Jerimijenko (though her Ooz Inc. project and his Animal Estates project are fairly similar), yet he does craft some very exciting language around being a catalyst for community activity, and so while I’ve seen his work in a number of places over the last year or so, I thought it was finally time to post it.
The project that seemed most appropriate to note is his Edible Estates, an ongoing collection of front-yard or community gardens across the US, where he basically directs the tearing up of suburban grass farms to replace them with vegetables and native plants. The image above is from Maplewood, New Jersey.
I’ve seen a few front yards in Windsor and Essex County without grass, but I’d be interested to know where they are specifically, or if there are others hidden throughout the area. Maybe instead of one community garden in Sandwich, we should be pushing for the transformation of all the front yards on a block to be one, big connected garden? Yes, we should.
Given the recent conversations around the installation of astroturf on the Dougall gateway, I had to post this. Made by Alina and Jeff Bliumis, Be Happy uses astroturf to illustrate a photograph of one of many interviews in which the artists asked people shopping in a Russian bookstore to share their American Dream.
[via WMMNA & ::: Alina and Jeff Bliumis ::: ]
Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, May 5th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll continue work on our magnetic planters and planning for the summer! If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments…