After a short holiday recess, we are starting Broken City Lab office hours again on Tuesday, January 6th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be doing some catch up from the break and then working on planning some upcoming projects and events.
I’ve found a group of individuals who have been creating some absolutely amazing work bordering on sound and technology called Intermod Series. I may post a few of their works as I feel many of them are extremely interesting. This particular project consists of a sound transmitting device and is called Project Citizens Band.
“This project was a month long broadcast over CB radio using prerecorded sounds designed to be mood altering. Four different audio tracks corresponded to common emotions experienced at the scheduled time of day. These were transmitted for a 5-minute duration, creating a sedative or stimulating affect.”
I got the needed resistors right before Christmas, though hadn’t had a chance to post this yet. As you can see, there’s a 270Ω resistor, a 9V battery, and a 10mm LED working… along with the resistors, I got a 9V power supply, so we can make signs and run them off the wall, rather than relying on a ton of batteries. As I’m unsure about just how long a whole bunch of LEDs could run on battery, I suppose depending on the size of the batteries this could vary… connecting a bunch of D batteries to add up to 9V will certainly last longer than one of these alone.
We’ll get started on this soon.
I just got back from out of town, I’m exhausted, having spent the last few days in northern Michigan (I forgot what it’s like to have real winter, it was nice). I pulled this out of the freezer, having nearly forgotten I had finished it, I had some difficulty freezing this one, mostly because I was trying to do so outside right when things were beginning to thaw.
I’m really looking forward to 2009—so many things to do and many more ideas to come. Posts should start up regularly again in the next day or so.
Tomorrow night, December 28th, at 8pm, Spacing Magazine‘s Shawn Micallef (in conjunction with Scaledown.ca and InternationalMetropolis.com) will be hosting a Psychogeographic Walk through Windsor. The walk will start and end at Phog and will consist of a simple algorithm to get people moving through the city. After everyone comes back, the routes will get mapped, highlighting discovered details and personal landmarks.
For more information and to hear the PSA running on CJAM, check out the post on ScaleDown.
PS. The image above has nothing to do with Windsor or psychogeography, but is a still from a Pedestrian Scramble time-lapse video made by Sam Javanrouh that I saw (and liked) on Spacing Magazine’s website.
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks developing this project, and somehow waited until the coldest night yet to install the first successful Text On Ice (You Changed Everything) project. I’ll post some more details on the (ongoing) process later this week, but wanted to get this image up first.
This first iteration of the project is mounted via monofilament line, basically just tied to the fence. The plan is to embed the line into the ice on future versions of the project. The text will also change from work to work.
Considering how cold it is this year in Windsor, it’s actually a good time to do this project, as it likely won’t melt for a while.
I saw an ad for CCA‘s Actions: What You Can Do With the City exhibition in the current issue of Border Crossings and the title got the best of me. I quickly flipped through the rest of the magazine, then went about exploring the Tools for Actions website.
On the site, you’ll find 99 actions, ranging from a seed bomb missile launcher to the Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s Map of Least Surveillance. There’s a lot to look at and ideas abound, feel free to note any particularly interesting projects in the comments.
“Art Shanty Projects is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.”
As you can see, they have experimented with ice lettering in a more permanent fashion. These are more like ice gravestones, aside from the text. I think ours could be more thoughtful, but it’s nice to see examples of something we’d like to accomplish.
It’s also an interesting idea to create an artistic community for a set period of time in a temporary natural setting.
Tapewriter is a font that uses duct tape and the grid of fences made by graphic designers. Apparently duct tape is the exact width of the grid of this type of fences, I like the pixelation effect.
[via]
This work is by a New York base artist named Joshua Allen Harris, who creates characters that essentially become alive and animated once they harness unused, unrealized city energy. i.e. Air conditioning units, subway trains, fans etc.
I really like this idea of trapping energy and illustrating/quantifying it and infusing it with an unnatural property to animate it in some way.
Can we give the surplus of superfluous Windsor energy a colour, a materiality or a taste?