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OPEN: Discussing Financial Precarity and Alternative Economies

OPEN: Discussing Financial Precarity and Alternative Economies

Featuring a panel discussion with Professor Jeff Noonan and members of Broken City Lab, with an art installation by Michael DiRisio.

Questions such as what caused the global recession and how can we effect change will be asked in an open format, with an emphasis on collaborative thought and horizontal discussion. An exhibition of installation and video work by University of Windsor MFA candidate Michael DiRisio, who will be moderating, will provide a greater context for the talk.

The event is free and open to the public, and there will be refreshments.

Thursday Nov. 1, 7 p.m.
Mackenzie Hall, Main Gallery
3277 Sandwich Street, Windsor

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Upcoming HRG Talk: GINA REICHERT & MITCH COPE of Detroit’s Powerhouse Productions

Image courtesy of http://www.powerhouseproject.com/

The University of Windsor’s Humanities Research Group 2012-2013 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS SERIES presents GINA REICHERT & MITCH COPE of Power House Productions / Design 99.

“Too Much of a Good Thing”

Mitch and Gina will discuss work initiated in their Detroit neighborhood over the past six years as visual artists (Design 99) and as facilitators and collaborators (Power House Productions).

7:00 pm, Thursday, October 18, 2012 at the Freed Orman Centre, Assumption University on the University of Windsor campus.

A reception follows the lecture.

For more information, phone 519-253-3000, extension 3508, or email hrgmail@uwindsor.ca

No admission charge.

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FEAST with Sam Lefort on Friday, October 5th at 7pm

You’re invited to a FEAST this Friday, October 5th at 7pm at CIVIC SPACE hosted by our Artist-in-Residence, Sam Lefort. This free dinner event kicks off her month-long residency and her return after an incredible week of workshops earlier this summer.

The Feast Worldwide dinner party for good takes place on the final day of The Feast Conference, October 5. Pick a challenge, host a dinner, and by the end of your meal, kick-off a project to make the world better. The evening will include:

– A real-time world map of all the dinners taking place from Auckland to Dubai
– Official Challenges—Poverty Challenge presented by Mark Bezos of Robin Hood, Health Challenge presented by Arcade Fire on behalf of Partners in Health and more!
– Dedicated dinner pages to interact with other guests via Twitter
– A huge bank of resources to help make your ideas happen

Learn more at worldwide.feastongood.com

Please RSVP on Twitter @s_lefort or contact@samanthalefort.com.

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The Weekend Here and Around the Province

It’s a busy weekend all over the place with an opening and a new project, culture days, and some great events hosted by dear friends of ours here in Windsor. Here’s the breakdown of what you might want to check out this weekend:

We’re back to North Bay for our opening of Surviving North Bay at White Water Gallery. After concluding our research micro-residency this past summer we returned to Windsor to brainstorm ways to address the concerns that residents of North Bay brought up about the city. The result: a series of survival kits designed to help North Bay face whatever the future the city has in store. Each red plastic kit contains useful and unique items to artfully solve local problems, and can be found on display in the Gallery for the next six weeks. There will be an opening reception on Friday at 7 pm.

In Toronto at Nuit Blanche on Saturday, we’ll be at the Gladstone for a new projection-based work – No Rights / No Wrongs, which will aim to highlight and articulate a series of indecisive statements on ideas of civic responsibility, community development, and political participation through large-scale projections on the side of the Gladstone.

 

Artcite Members and Friends!
Join Us this FRIDAY NIGHT, all Night @ THE LOOP
September 28, 2012 – 156 Chatham St. West (upper), Windsor, ON N9A 4M3

SHIRK  –  a DJ Night benefit for Artcite with DJs Sthephen Pender, Martin (Zonk) Deck, Matthew Hawtin and special guests

This Friday, 28 September, in the midst of Windsor’s Culture Days events, the Loop on Chatham Street is hosting a fundraiser for Artcite,
an event that kicks off our 30th anniversary celebrations. There will be three or four dj-s, including Martin ‘Zonk’ Deck, Matthew Hawtin, and Stephen Pender, plus a surpise guest or two.

The suggested donation is $4 at the door, which is deposited straight into Artcite’s coffers, and garners you a night of dub, techno, soul, Detroit funk, all good things.

Please spread the word, and support local artist-run culture.
Newest info here or on the Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/350784671680498

Art and Ecology Sidewalk Parade


12:00 – 3:00 on Saturday, September 29, 2012
parade route begins @ ACWR 1942 Wyandotte Street E. Windsor, ON

The Art and Ecology Sidewalk parade is a performance artwork lead by Dr. Jennifer Willet of the School for Arts and Creative Innovation. The parade will draw community members into discussion about art and ecology in the Windsor Area with all participants collaborating in the production of a whimsical spectacle involving music and rhythm (10 block walk in total). The event will commence at the Arts Council of Windsor & Region (ACWR) and conclude the Canada South Science City on Marion Street in Windsor, ON.

Join them – rain or shine
for more info about bioart research and other initiatives at uwindsor: www.incubatorartlab.com

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All Tomorrow’s Problems: the Biweekly Design Night for Future-Focused People

Starting on October 1st at 7pm, we’ll be running biweekly Design Nights focused on creative problem solving All Tomorrow’s Problems. Namely, we’re going to kick things off looking at the issues of youth retention in the city and gradually move on to other future-focused issues.

BCL’s Research Director, Justin, and a rotating co-host will guide the 2-hour studio, which will involve walks, discussions, rapid prototyping and wrap up with an exhibition in December.

Everyone is welcome, though space is limited. Please note that you should bring the following:

  • sketchbook, camera, laptop, drawing tools
  • an open mind and willingness to have productive conversations
  • an appreciation that this isn’t about problem-solving so much as an exercise in utopian-minded praxis

The dates to mark in your calendars:

  • Mondays in October: 1st, 15th, 29th at 7pm-9pm
  • Mondays in November: 12th, 26th at 7pm-9pm
  • Mondays in December: 10th at 7pm-9pm

And, to close, some quick answers to questions that may arise:

You know that the name of this is really similar to All Tomorrow’s Parties, right?

Yes, absolutely. We appreciate the tone of that event and thought it was a nice way to reference doing things at a different scale.

Do I have to be prepared to make art or design anything?

Think of this as a very loosely organized place to discuss and exercise your ideas on a specific topic. We may not actually make anything, but we will aim to creatively respond to the issue at hand.

Do I have to commit to attending every design night?

We hope that you’ll be able to attend as many of these nights as possible, but we understand schedules change. Come when you can. We’ll be trying to accommodate as many people as we can.

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New Exhibition: AS OF 2012 WE ARE ALIVE & WELL: FOUR YEARS IN WINDSOR & BEYOND

FRIDAY, SEPT.14th, 2012 @ WAHC 7:30PM -10PM
OPENING RECEPTION: BROKEN CITY LAB
AS OF 2012 WE ARE ALIVE & WELL: FOUR YEARS IN WINDSOR & BEYOND

WAHC’s year- long exploration of growing up in working class cities or families concludes with the first ever career survey of art and urban research collective Broken City Lab.

Recently long listed for the Sobey Art Award, Broken City Lab’s four years of community engaged interventions across Canada have garnered critical praise, invigorated communities and raised fundamental questions regarding people’s relationships to public and private space within the urban environment, the institutions that define it, our agency as city dwellers within the contemporary urban milieu and the role of the arts and artists in shaping how we experience or engage with these environments.

Based in the industrial centre of Windsor, Ontario, the collective’s work has often deployed their hometown as source of inspiration, testing laboratory and a stand in for the hundreds of other communities across the country seeking to redefine their identities in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.

This exhibition explores the group’s relationship to Windsor through revisiting their earliest works and illustrating how those works have shaped and defined their undertakings in communities across the country.

About the Artists

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.

The processes of Broken City Lab remain grounded in the lab’s observations and concerns about Windsor, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city.

Broken City Lab’s creative activity is rooted in community-based social practice, where the lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace.

This exhibition is supported by the Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant.

OAC-logo-EPS-2

Also on September 14 & 15 in Hamilton:

Broken City Catalogue Launch – Friday Sept 14 and Sat Sept 15th, 7-11 pm, in the foyer of Hamilton Artists Inc. including distribution of fibre-based works from the installation on the Cannon St Wall.
Curated by Julie Rene de Cotret.

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Research Trip: Residency at White Water Gallery for A Northern Locality

photo: http://www.merlex.ca/

We’re heading up to White Water Gallery next week for a weeklong residency exploring a northern locality — this work will inform an exhibition coming up in the fall!

Over the course of a weeklong residency, we will engage in a series of exploratory public interventions, micro-gestures, and tactical DIY responses to North Bay.

Join us on Tuesday night at 8pm for a psycho-geographic walk around the downtown starting at White Water Gallery, an “afternoon intervention task force” on Wednesday at 7pm, and an outdoor participatory public projection event on Thursday night at 9pm.

Each event will call on public participation to engage with North Bay, its infrastructures and its communities. Throughout the residency, we’ll be collecting research on North Bay in support of an exhibition in the fall that will aim to not only examine the practice and production of a northern locality, but also present a range of resistive tactics that can help the community survive, or help one survive the community.

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Project Launch June 21st: The Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions)

Save the Date: June 21st, 2012 at 7pm

CIVIC SPACE (411 Pelissier St, downtown Windsor)

On June 21st at 7pm, we’ll be kicking things CIVIC SPACE with the Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). This open community project invites anyone and everyone to come borrow from our letterset to caption the city around them.

With Windsor at the edge of so many transitions, how might we collectively reclaim and create our own public narratives about the future of our city through this playful intervention?

Anyone participating will be issued a Letter Library Card and will able to sign out 12″ 3D letters from our collection to create their own temporary installation, document it with one of our single-use cameras, and ultimately help to build an archive of new captions for the city’s build environment.

More soon.

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New Exhibition: Unrest Everywhere (Tools for Playing with Halifax)

Just back from an incredible week installing at Eye Level Gallery for our show, Unrest Everywhere (tools for playing with Halifax), which runs until May 12, 2012. The show features a number of multiples and interactive works, all of which are yours for the taking and borrowing.

The premise for the show was to create a series of works that could directly or indirectly suggest access points for re-encountering the city and your role within it. We created works that aimed to be highly distributable, playful, and allowed a bit of critical commentary on the ways in which a sense of place comes to be planned, articulated, and established.

Below is a huge pile of documentation of the process — but first — we’d like to extend a huge thanks to all staff and volunteers at Eye Level, especially Michael and Matt, and to Emily and Kaley for the place to crash!

Continue reading “New Exhibition: Unrest Everywhere (Tools for Playing with Halifax)”

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RISK: Design Vulnerability

RISK, a conference that highlights present predicaments in architecture and urban planning, will explore the intersection between entrepreneurship and practice, taking risks in design, coopting strategies from other disciplines to advance architecture and planning, and in general not being afraid of change.

A dynamic group of speakers will engage the topic in 15-minute presentations, followed by faculty responses to provide commentary and provocations on themes such as personal risk; professional risk; environmental risk; risk of investing in the central city; and design as risk.

Details

March 30, 2012
Rackham Auditorium, 915 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Time: 10 AM – 6:30 PM, Doors Open at 9 AM

Justin is presenting on the Design Vulnerability panel, moderated by Walter B. Sanders Fellow, Etienne Turpin, alongside these incredible speakers:

Ricardo Dominguez, Associate Professor, UCSD; Co-Founder, Electronic Disturbance Theater

Jean-Maxime Dufresne & Jean-François Prost, Principals, SYN – Atelier d’exploration urbaine

Fernando Fuentes & Lorena Méndez, Co-founders, La Lleca Colectiva

Here’s the brief for the panel:

From the perspective of design research, the laboratory is a model for investigating urban scenography, interstitial space, transient icons, and the political economies which shape architecture and the city. The lab is not, in this model, the hygienic space portioned from the world to afford a distanced observation; the lab is instead a platform for embedded forms of inquiry, intervention, speculation, and experimentation. These precarious forms of practice are affirmed through design strategies that embolden our experiences of vulnerability at the level of the city, the social, and the ecological. These practices do not attempt to erase vulnerability through design but instead leverage design research and performative experimentation by collaborating with and among various vulnerabilities. The panel considers how practices of accumulating vulnerability offer new models of courage and conviction for post-heroic architecture and design.