Jim Campbell’s Home Movies is a large-scale video installation consisting of hundreds of LEDs that render films spanning four decades into nearly illegible light and shadow. Seems like a good fit for such a cold night.
Oh, and I now have in my possession 200 10mm LEDs.
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We spent a couple hours last night highlighting areas in Windsor that are of interest to us, either as potential research sites, potential exploration sites, or places in need of further examination. If you have anything that should be added to the map, please do so, but in order to edit it, I think you need a Google account. In particular, it would be good to build a better directory of places for rent in the downtown core. I also tried to make a screencast of the discussion and mapping, but having some difficulty getting it to export—I’ll post it when/if I can get it to work.
Photo by Darren.
I’m still trying to understand the relationship between Detroit UnReal Estate Agency and Power House (and maybe they’re the same thing and there’s no other relationship to understand), but at any rate, the Power House project is an incredible idea. In short, “The house is to act as cultural catalyst and opportunity for cultural exchanges through workshops and residencies. It will also provide lessons in wind, solar, and sustainable strategies by implementing these systems and introducing them to the community.”
Basically, there’s a neighbourhood in Detroit that has been informally adopted as a site for this cultural catalyst. Many homes in the area have been foreclosed or set on fire, or both. Empty lots are going for $500, while homes are going for $2000. So, the Power House group proposes to purchase these lots and homes and flip the area from a drain on the tax base, bank holdings, and the local economics to a community asset.
I think this could be an excellent group to connect with.
We spent the last couple of daylight hours on Friday working with rope and one of the fences at LeBel. We needed to test some techniques for communicating via rope (or ribbon, as we later decided) on a fence for another project. After moving inside to the warmth, we also settled on a preferred material, our message, and a potential location.
Next Tuesday night, December 2nd, at 7pm, Broken City Lab will be holding a Social Mapping Event, where we’ll use the tools Google gave us and highlight potential study areas (and broken points of interest)—the Google Map itself will be made public afterwards. We’ll also make a screencast of the process and make it available on the website afterwards.
So, if you’ve been meaning to come out to our weekly Office Hours, but haven’t had the time yet, clear your schedule for next Tuesday.
Danielle and I will be participating in Work in Progress #2, an MFA/Faculty forum held semi-regularly at the School of Visual Arts. We’ll discuss Broken City Lab and, as Lee Rodney so fittingly put it, “the extreme adventures of artist collectives and collaborations.” As well, Lee will be discussing her new project, a Detroit-Windsor Bookmobile. Plus apple cider!
The details: Wednesday, December 3 @ 7pm, Room 115, LeBel.
I’ve been pointed to Learning To Love You More on a number of occasions, though it’s only recently that I’ve dug into the site a little bit more. The project was initiated by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher in 2002 and works around the assignments that participants are supposed to complete and document and send back to be posted on the website (and sometimes included in a book, an exhibition, a screening, or a radio broadcast). The image above is from Assignment #63 – Make an Encouraging Banner. I think if I were to have made a banner, it might have been something like that one.
That the project does get a fair amount of participants is inspiring, but the thing I like the most are the ideas of the assignments themselves and the fact that they exist, that they were written down, thought about, and attempted. Making a list is, at the very least, a starting point of fixing something.
Once again, you are cordially invited to our Broken City Lab office hours / team huddle on Tuesday, November 25th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be discussing upcoming projects, ongoing research, and recipes for Christmas cookies.
After some considerable thought, I decided to move BrokenCityLab.org over to WordPress. Previously, the site had been running on a basic CMS system I wrote myself. My hope is that this move will enable a more stable back-end for posting, commenting, etc, and keep me from having to do any heavy maintenance in PHP.
If you subscribed via RSS before, please adjust your reader to point to the new feed. You might notice that older comments are missing, but we’re going to work on this—the transition has been a fairly manual process, and so a bit more time-consuming than I would have liked, but I think most everything is in order now.
However, if you do stumble across anything strange, please let me know.
In a post on MAKE about how to embed 720p videos from YouTube, I found this great, short video about the history of LEDs and some quick notes at the end about the simplest way to make them work. I’m on the case of looking into getting a bulk order of LEDs from DigiKey.
Oh, and to embed 720p video (when available) add this to the embed source &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 or add this to the url just to watch a video on the YouTube page in 720p &fmt=22 … adding &fmt=18 will make any video play in high-quality h264 encoding.