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.
As I stumbled on the work of Richard Galpin, I wondered about the possibilities of creating hand-made or photographic experiments with Windsor’s architecture to help understand and interpret Windsor’s architectural setting. I believe that these types of activity could help us design projects involving commentary of our physical surroundings. Here are a few words to describe Richard’s working process.
“Richard Galpin’s complex art works are derived from the artist’s own photographs of chaotic cityscapes. Using only a scalpel Galpin intricately scores and peels away the emulsion from the surface of the photograph to produce a radical revision of the urban form. The artist allows himself no collaging, or additions of any kind – each delicate work is a unique piece made entirely by the erasure of photographic information.”
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…
With the recent addition of new bike racks in downtown Windsor, which I’m happy to see, and with the recent addition to some of those racks with some yarn bombs, downtown feels a bit more like a place, rather than just an any-space-whatever.
I’m also aware though, that Tecumseh has had an ongoing bike rack design competition, which has obviously been successful elsewhere. Above, there’s a photo from a recent installation of a bike rack sculpture in the Parkdale area of Toronto. With so, so, so many talented sculptors and artists in the city, this should be standard practice. Why doesn’t Artcite try to work with the city to have a small bike rack sculpture competition for the downtown core?
Alternatively, we here at Broken City Lab are working on brainstorming new ways to turn any piece of infrastructure into a functioning, safe, and secure bike rack.
[via Worldchanging & spacing]
Late last week, over 120 illegal billboards were taken over by Jordan Seiler’s incrediblely ambitious “New York Street Advertising Takeover.”
Organized as a reaction to the hundreds of billboards that are not registered with the city, and therefore are illegal (and yet not prosecuted by New York city), the NYSAT whitewashed and then over 80 artists went and repainted the spaces. Above is just one of the many treatments artists gave the former advertising space.
Conversation about looking into getting a small portion of the huge number of billboards going up in Windsor for artists was brought up at last night’s Artcite. Oh, the things we could do with billboard space.
[via Wooster Collective]
After taking a week off, Broken City Lab Office Hours started up again with a focus on getting a number of the shells for the magnetic planters completed. It was a really productive meeting with some more welcomed new faces and a whole bunch of planters now ready for the next step. It wasn’t all fun though, we lost an invaluable BCL member—Mike’s blender.
re:farm the city is a low-tech urban / community garden project of sorts. The image above is a part of that low tech. This is a simple monitoring system developed using Arduino and Processing that will track humidity levels in six planters and alert the gardener if they get too low (essentially broadcasting that they are in need of watering).
The project is aimed at developing a series of tools that would enable city-dwellers to grow and monitor an urban garden using open-software and open-hardware and as much recycled materials as possible. It also focuses on new ways of visualizing and understanding relationships between plants situated in close or distanced proximity to one another.
I’ve been anxious to get into learning more Arduino for a while, but we haven’t seemed to have an appropriate project as of yet. Maybe there are some ways to include some technology that would aid in the educational element of our community garden…
[via we make money not art ]