Once again, you are cordially invited to our Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, December 9th, 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 playing with LEDs.
We’ve been doing this for the last week or so on a fairly irregular basis (mostly because I never seem to get into the school before noon). Pictured above is Danielle’s 9/11 video. This TV was originally installed (as legend has it) to screen advertising from Xerox, as they had offered free photocopying to the student population. Since then, the photocopier is out of toner and the TV itself hasn’t been turned on since the very beginning of the summer. Thinking it was a considerable waste to have it there and not showing anything (like student’s artwork for example), we had used this TV previously for playing Tetris.
Since then we’ve had a DVD player occasionally playing some of our own video works, but we’re certainly looking for more material to screen—let us know if you have anything!
The 10mm LEDs I ordered from Evil Mad Science came in and I went out today to get a CR2032 3V battery to start testing.
The recent season change reminds me of how much our temperature drops during the winter and how much our city changes aesthetically. On that note, I was wondering how other “green art”-type groups deal with their surroundings.
I found a group call Austin Green Art from Austin, Texas which seems to focus on using existing materials (disposed or excessively produced) to make useful structures and raise awareness of environmental issues. While this group is about as different from Broken City Lab – they seem to market to children quite a bit and require constant donations for operation – as it is similiar, it’s nice to see participation from a wide range of age groups in their documentation.
I found this “Green Bench” to be a great example of a project that could encorporate ideas such as: static visual art display (in the plastic cover), shelter, sustaining plant life, and potential solar energy production. I’d like to see benches like this line a few of Windsor’s streets.
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.
[via]
I’ll write a full post when it isn’t nearly three in the morning, but I just wanted to toss out this thing that I started working on tonight.
A couple of us are trying to come up with any number of actions that might serve the dual purpose of helping to stave off (or at least forestall) the proposed closure of one of Windsor’s only two independent urban post offices, while at the same time gathering primary sources concerning the makeup, operation and needs of the Sandwich neighborhood.
I think a coloring contest may be somehow involved.
Possibly. Or not. We’ll see.
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.
I came across this last week while I was browsing for sound artists. It’s basically a collaborative sound art project directed by Agricola de Cologne, New Media curator and media artist from Cologne/Germany. There are currently 10 curators and their contributions featuring about 200 sound art works from about 150 artists.
“SoundLAB is focusing on thematic aspects, i.e “memory and identity” and related themes, and is developed for being presented in physical space in media exhibitions and festivals, as well as in virtual space as streaming applications in online environments…”
I find the site a bit overwhelming, but like the ‘soundworks‘ section which features samples of current sound artworks. Listening to them one at a time is good, but playing a few at once is the real fun. This seems like a good example of current sound art and might be inspiration for any sound work we might create.
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.