We won’t be meeting this week (April 20 – 26), with school finishing up, we’re going to take the week off. We’ll be back on with weekly office hours on April 28th and throughout the summer (though we’re still determining exactly what that schedule is going to be). Stay tuned.
See the Opportunity developed by Leo Burnett Lisboa and Arc Lisbon is a Firefox plugin that automatically replaces the word crisis with the word opportunity throughout your internet travels.
Not unlike Steve Lambert’s Add-Art, this is another great use of the extensibility that is the Firefox plugin framework.
What are those plugins written in? Does anyone know how to do this? I think developing a Windsor-specific plugin could be a great summer project.
[via Scott Burnham]
Our recipe from the other night produced a much stronger planter, though I think there’s still room to add a coat of wheat paste to the outside. The rare earth magnets do well if there’s two, but I think the best solution will be to adhere them to the outside of the planter, or embed them in the pulp (which would make things a bit more difficult). Ideally, we’d use one magnet per planter.
This planter is about the size of a cigarette carton, but should be perfect for a sprout of wild flowers or cat grass or something more interesting, with lots of depth for the roots to do their thing. Plus, we’re now thinking that there’s a good amount of surface area to work with for some text / stenciling / recipe, etc.
Another cold, rainy Tuesday for Office Hours, but we were inside imagining spring. We pushed ahead on doing some more research and development on the planters, started a plant list and design ideas for the community garden, and got closer to finalizing the list of submissions from Text In-Transit.
The wild flower seeds from last year are still good—I planted these seeds on Thursday or Friday and they’re growing like crazy already. The paper planter shaped around the spray paint can lid and reinforced with some wheat paste is holding up, as is the magnet.
We have an idea for a better shape and some good suggestions for further reinforcement, and I placed an order for 1/2″ rare-earth magnets tonight, so we’re on track for getting this project off the ground in the next few weeks.
More research to do, but I’m excited with where this project is going!
I can’t say it much better than Chris over at Scaledown, so I’ll just reblog it here:
The time has come for the City of Windsor to investigate adjusting its ward boundaries to better reflect the redistribution of our population we’ve realized over the past thirty years. Yes, the last time this has been analyzed was 1978.
There has been a significant move to the ‘burbs over the course of the last three decades, and the boundaries of our ward representation has yet to catch up with this trend. Wards one and five have noticed the greatest amount of land use homogeneity with the vast majority of their residential poulation living in raised ranch housing. Wards two and three have been continuously bleeding residents to these new subdivisions, while our other urban ward, ward four, has only grown due to the recently annexed land by the airport.
There will be 3 ward boundary review meetings:
Wednesday, April 15, 7-9pm (Forest Glade Community Centre)
Thursday, April 16, 4-6pm (Windsor Water World)
Thursday, April 16, 7-9pm (South Windsor Recreation Complex)
This could dramatically impact the next election and the future of city council representation in Windsor, so if you have time, and especially if these review locations are in your neighbourhood, it’s definitely worth going.
Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, April 14, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Many things to discuss—community gardens, planters, summer events, cross-border communications, etc. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!
I went out to the site for our proposed community garden to take some photos yesterday. It’s looking fairly likely that this will be the site for our community garden starting this summer. This park is located at Russell and Mill near the Sandwich windmill. We’re still working out all the details, but everything has been really positive so far. Many more details to follow, but for now, I just started to visually map out there area.
Pardon me for being a little behind the times, but John Baldessari‘s “California Map Project” from 1969 strikes a chord of creativity in me. Maybe we could find a way to blend the scale of this project with the plausibility of our Google Earth rooftop idea. Basically, John Baldessari took a map of California (bottom right) and went to the places where the map letters “California” would be located, and spelled out the letters in rocks or other ways.
From the artist – “Photographs of letters that spell California and of the map used for locating the site of each letter. The letters vary in scale from one foot to approximatly one hundred feet, and in materials used. The letters are located as near as possible within the area occupied by the letters on the map. The idea was to see the landscape as a map and to actually execute each letter and symbol of the map employed on the corresponding part of the earth. It was an attempt to make the real world match a map, to impose a language on nature and vice-versa.”
Despite the snow, the lethargy onset by exam schedules and year-end assignments, and a few core BCL folk leaving town for the summer, we had a great and productive meeting. We started going through the Text In-Transit submissions, continued working on our magnetic planters, worked on our Rhizome commission, brainstormed the idea of a book, and started to refine our ideas for our community garden (more details on this soon).