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Text in Knitted Tags

Text Knit Tag

At last night’s Media City screening, I ran into Samantha and Laura whose schedules unfortunately hadn’t been able to align with BCL’s Office Hours in the last couple of weeks. I asked about their progress with their yarn bombs, which have been installed in numerous locations in downtown Windsor, and are gradually covering the entirety of the bike racks outside of Phog.

I wondered about the potential of adding text to the tags, which could lead to a really large intervention / eventual collection of handmade scarves.

This could be an amazing project! Sam already posted her efforts from last night on her blog, and the results are really encouraging!!! I think this could be one of our next summer projects.

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GOOD’s Livable Streets

GOOD Magazine's Livable Streets Winner

GOOD recently had a Livable Streets competition where they invited readers to do some rendering and Photoshopping of holistic redesigns. The winner, Steve Price, reimagined Portsmouth, Virginia with infill development, light rail, and dedicated bike paths.

We need to do this for Windsor. Anyone up for putting their skills to use? Maybe Scaledown should try to push something like this forward.

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Public Sculpture Tackle

Public Sculpture Tackle

Public Sculpture Tackle rethinks interaction with public sculpture. Performed by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the work is pretty much what it sounds like; artists in the BHQF wear makeshift-athletic gear and attempt to tackle public sculptures in Manhattan, which is, by nature, “on the defense.”

I keep thinking about what public sculpture looks like in Windsor and wondering about what it means to have a sculpture ghetto garden. Public sculpture should be integrated into the streets.

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Temporary Downtown Space for BCL

406 Pelissier, Windsor, Ontario

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.

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Rhizome 2010 Finalist

Broken City Lab Rhizome 2010 Finalist

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.

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Wonderful Windsor Ringtone (updated!!!)

Windsor and Detroit from above circa 1960

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.

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Parking Tickets – Batch 1

Parking Tickets

Broken City Lab met in December of last year to visualize, create, and link our goals for 2009 and created a large mind map to help with this process.  One of the ideas brought up at this time was the following: create parking tickets that resemble those distributed by City of Windsor or University of Windsor Parking Service officials, but spin the ticket information in a way that compliments the owner of the vehicle instead of notifies him or her of impending fines. The first series of tickets display the message “operation of fuel efficient vehicle” in the space where “parking violation” or something similar would usually appear. I’ve posted the initial ticket design and two examples of the types of vehicles receiving these tickets. This will most likely be an ongoing process that I will complete throughout the summer, but since the City of Windsor Parking Services is currently on strike, these tickets should appear slightly confusing to the vehicle owners.

Continue reading “Parking Tickets – Batch 1”

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Office Hours

Biweekly Office Hours for May and June 2009

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)…