Next Tuesday night, December 2nd, at 7pm, Broken City Lab will be holding a Social Mapping Event, where we’ll use the tools Google gave us and highlight potential study areas (and broken points of interest)—the Google Map itself will be made public afterwards. We’ll also make a screencast of the process and make it available on the website afterwards.
So, if you’ve been meaning to come out to our weekly Office Hours, but haven’t had the time yet, clear your schedule for next Tuesday.
I’ve been pointed to Learning To Love You More on a number of occasions, though it’s only recently that I’ve dug into the site a little bit more. The project was initiated by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher in 2002 and works around the assignments that participants are supposed to complete and document and send back to be posted on the website (and sometimes included in a book, an exhibition, a screening, or a radio broadcast). The image above is from Assignment #63 – Make an Encouraging Banner. I think if I were to have made a banner, it might have been something like that one.
That the project does get a fair amount of participants is inspiring, but the thing I like the most are the ideas of the assignments themselves and the fact that they exist, that they were written down, thought about, and attempted. Making a list is, at the very least, a starting point of fixing something.
Broken City Lab has been nominated in a variety if categories for this years Canadian Blog Awards including:
First round voting is currently underway. VOTE!
Once again, you are cordially invited to our Broken City Lab office hours / team huddle on Tuesday, November 25th, 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 recipes for Christmas cookies.
After some considerable thought, I decided to move BrokenCityLab.org over to WordPress. Previously, the site had been running on a basic CMS system I wrote myself. My hope is that this move will enable a more stable back-end for posting, commenting, etc, and keep me from having to do any heavy maintenance in PHP.
If you subscribed via RSS before, please adjust your reader to point to the new feed. You might notice that older comments are missing, but we’re going to work on this—the transition has been a fairly manual process, and so a bit more time-consuming than I would have liked, but I think most everything is in order now.
However, if you do stumble across anything strange, please let me know.
I have been interested in field recording and found sound as of late, but do not know of many artists. I stumbled across an experimental electronic sound artist named Stephen Vitiello. He uses atmospheric noises for most of his audio work and has worked with artists such as Tony Oursler and Julie Mehretu.
“In 1999 he was awarded a studio for six months on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower One, where he recorded the cracking noises of the building swaying under the stress of the winds after Hurricane Floyd.”
I had a hard time finding visual documentation of his sound installations besides a short video of a project called “Flutter“, which was a collaboration with Molly Berg at the World Financial Center in NY.
I really like the idea of using the vertical space and atmosphere of a building to create sound. I can think of at least one building at the University of Windsor with the height to accomodate a project such as this.
In a post on MAKE about how to embed 720p videos from YouTube, I found this great, short video about the history of LEDs and some quick notes at the end about the simplest way to make them work. I’m on the case of looking into getting a bulk order of LEDs from DigiKey.
Oh, and to embed 720p video (when available) add this to the embed source &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 or add this to the url just to watch a video on the YouTube page in 720p &fmt=22 … adding &fmt=18 will make any video play in high-quality h264 encoding.
In The Air is a data visualization project initiated at MediaLab-Prado in Madrid. The project has taken a large dataset consisting of a year’s worth of air quality readings from Madrid and is beginning to realize a number of ways to make visible the invisible agents of the city’s air (gases, particles, pollen, etc). In The Air is using both web interfaces and physical prototypes for representing the data, and while the web component looks very slick, I’m considerably more interested in the physical parts.
I’m not sure how well the images read above, but those are some examples of their process as they work their way through Arduino-controlled contraptions that will spray out different colours of mist depending on the air quality data. There’s a video of one of their failed attempts on Serial Cosign, which is where I originally saw the project.
Seeing people do stuff is inspiring.
I saw an article on GOOD Magazine today that talked about initiatives that US colleges on the west coast are taking on to encourage more students biking to school. Among these initiatives are giving out free bus passes, car and bike sharing programs, shortening the school week and even paying students not to drive.
The University of Windsor (partly pictured above), as a commuter school, is essentially surrounded by parking lots. For some students, coming up from Essex County or even Tecumseh, taking public transit is not an option… (Let’s forget that there was once a commuter train that went from Kingsville, through Essex, and into Windsor). There are a number of obstacles for other students to get to school, even if they live within range of Transit Windsor’s routes—namely that it takes far too long to get to school by bus and to take a bicycle anywhere but along the riverfront is taking your life into your own hands.
There are proposed solutions to make the campus into more of a campus, with a sustained student body, and less of a drive-thru educational depot, such as increasing the cost of parking even more, and I’m wondering if the next few years might not be especially crucial to shift the student body onto public transit. With the economy so depressed, affording gas, insurance, parking, and car payments may be impossible, so why isn’t there another referendum to try to instate a University bus pass? Especially for students at Lebel, making it to main campus and back again in time for classes that are back to back is difficult, what if there was an electric shuttle that could get you back and forth in five minutes? How much would you be willing to add to your tuition for that? What if there was a dedicated bike path from Lebel to main campus? What if there was a bike sharing program with drop-off points at Lebel, the St Denis Centre, Odette and the Library? Should we buy some bikes and make our own bike-sharing program?
In hopes of making this a regular affair, we’re going to be holding office hours Tuesday, November 18th, from 7-9pm at 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 our next demo/event.