art – Page 4 – Broken City Lab

November 9, 2009July 5, 2018

The Leona Drive Project

Organized by The Public Access Collective in collaboration with L.O.T. : Experiments in Urban Research (Collective), The Leona Drive Project took six vacant bungalows set for demolition by HYATT HOMES, a developer in Willowdale, Ontario, and turned them into temporary sites for art interventions.

The project is already over, it was up for just the last week of October, but it looks like it was a huge amount of fun, and obviously drew parallels to our own Indian Road. From their site, “While the curators anticipate several sub-themes emerging from the individual artists, the overall problematic for the exhibition is the remarkable shift from the suburbs of old to the suburbs of contemporary Canada, namely the neighborhoods and precincts of the multicultural, but nonetheless parsed state. As such, the project will interrogate what has been lost in terms of the older identities and utopias, domestic, regional and national, and the concomitant transformations around issues of gender, race, class and what was broadly proclaimed as the good life.”

Late last spring, there was some discussion about putting together a proposal for The Leona Drive Project along with some other Windsor artists / thinkers, but we just couldn’t pull our idea into the right context for the project. Our idea involved working in some capacity with the houses on Indian Road. That idea, along with some other recent discussions about the potentials for other installations to occur on a series of vacant lots or the like, might just lead to something doable. Really, there are so many places around the city that could be the centre of an excellent conversation, we need to start addressing them, so be on the look out, or help us track down some landlords (landlords other than the Ambassador Bridge).

November 7, 2009July 5, 2018

AMPHIBIOUS ARCHITECTURE

A project by xClinic Environmental Health Clinic at NYU and the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, AMPHIBIOUS ARCHITECTURE attempts to generate a new dialogue between the environment and us.

The description, quoted from the site, since it’s more clear than my attempt at synthesizing the information would be:

“Installed at two sites along the East and the Bronx Rivers in New York, the project is a network of floating interactive buoys housing a range of sensors below water and an array of LEDs above water. The sensors monitor water quality, the presence of fish, and human interest in the river’s ecosystem, while the lights respond to the sensors, creating feedback loops between humans, fish in their shared environment.

Additionally an SMS interface allows homo-citizens to text-message the fish and receive real-time information about the river, contributing towards the collective display of human interest in the aquatic environment. The aim of which is to simultaneously spark a larger public interest and dialogue about our local waterways.”

These are the sensors lit up before being installed in the river. To see some video of the sensors actually installed and floating, you’ll have to check out the site’s landing page.

This is an image of some of the sensors lit up, being activated by passing fish, water conditions, and text messages. It’s an amazing cool project, especially given our proximity and recent interest in imagining some kind of Detroit River based project.

September 28, 2009July 5, 2018

ArtPrize: Or How to Put a City on the World Map Right Now

Have you heard of ArtPrize? Not familiar? Check it: Over 1200 artists showing their work throughout the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan; the public votes on their favourite works through a variety of online methods; the winner gets $250,000.

A citywide exhibition at this scale is pretty much unheard of and this amount of prize money is a first too.

So, I of course posted this with Windsor in mind. I’ve been to Grand Rapids before, once, it seemed like a great city—the downtown had a few great coffee shops near the DAAC, and a few boarded up storefronts, a decent mix of people, generally not that different from Windsor. And so, I have to ask, what would Windsor look like if we opened up the entire city to an arts festival?

Of course, Grand Rapids had the good fortune of having a wealthy family throw in the prize money from their foundation, and also stepped up to the plate first, but the attention that’s being focused on Grand Rapids is incredible and admirable.

I’m not suggesting that I think that the best way to experience art is to cram over 1000 works onto every open floor or wall space in the downtown area, nor do I think that there’s likely even a lot of great art in that batch of 1200 artists, but this idea, as a novel way to inject some interest into a place, is huge.

What might Windsor’s ArtPrize look like? I’m not sure, but we need to start thinking at this scale if we’re ever going to get this place moving in the right direction.

[via Good]

September 23, 2009July 5, 2018

Drive-Thru Symphony + Border Bookmobile + Laboratory Ecologies

TODAY in Windsor, there’s an incredible amount of activity happening. The Green Corridor will host a talk / workshop from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grant officers, two artist performances, and one huge outdoor event to bring culture to the NAFTA freeway.

Lee Rodney will launch her Border Bookmobile—a Windsor-made 1993 Plymouth Voyager stocked with a collection of artist books, theoretical texts, maps, and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world.

Jennifer Willet will conduct ongoing laboratory research and hold a bio-art workshop with the general public in the presentation of her work InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies. This piece explores the laboratory removed from its sterilized artificial setting and placed in an outside world full of environmental organisms and ecologies.

The Green Corridor along with composer Brent Lee, visual artist Sigi Torinus, Assumption High School musicians, What Seas What Shores, CJAM 91.5fm, and others will create a one-hour performance of music and visuals that interact with the passing traffic on Huron Church Road near the Pedestrian Overpass. Drivers can tune-in to the performance in near-realtime and contribute to the Drive-Thru Symphony by honking their horns, or revving their engines, or generally making noise. Broken City Lab will also be contributing through a number of projects by us as individuals.

Here’s the schedule:

1:00 – 2:30 – Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council

Integrated Arts Programs Information Session

Room 115 LeBel Building, University of Windsor

3:00 – 6:00 – Border Bookmobile, Lee Rodney

InsideOut: Labratory Ecologies, Jennifer Willet

8:00 – 9:30 – Drive thru Sympony Performance

Nature Bridge Pedestrian Overpass,

Huron Church Rd. at Millen St.

1:00 – 2:30 – Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council / Integrated Arts Programs Information Session / Room 115 LeBel Building, University of Windsor

3:00 – 6:00 – Border Bookmobile, Lee Rodney / InsideOut: Labratory Ecologies, Jennifer Willet

8:00 – 9:30 – Drive thru Sympony Performance / Nature Bridge Pedestrian Overpass / Huron Church Rd. at Millen St.

This is going to be an amazing event, dare I say, history-making. You need to be there.

September 11, 2009July 5, 2018

Bureau for Open Culture: DESCENT TO REVOLUTION

Descent to Revolution, and exhibition / residency created by the Bureau for Open Culture, features five international artist collectives and collaboratives that use urban spaces and social spheres as means of production and inspiration. During the course of the exhibition, participating artists visit Columbus in a series of residencies to make projects specific to the city. The work does not take place inside the space of the gallery but in concert with community and physical mediums outside of it.

Contributing to the exhibition is Claire Fontaine, Learning Site, Red76, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, and Tercerunquinto, and all will be working within some relation of the city of Columbus and its community.

Pictured above is Audible Dwelling by Learning Site, a combination loudspeaker and dwelling that responds, in part, to the proliferation of abandoned malls, parking lots, and housing in downtown Columbus. Audible Dwelling is situated in a parking lot on CCAD’s campus. During their dates of residency visitors follow the arrows on the floor out the gallery door to visit Audible Dwelling, to experience it by listening and by leaving a story that is eventually projected into public space via loudspeaker.

Will there by time for a road trip to Columbus???

This project is really exciting to see for a number of reasons, maybe the top one being that it’s nearly exactly what I wish we could do… I wish we had the money to do something as large-scale as this, or even money just to pay for materials for projects we’d like to realize through a program like this. For now though, our Micro-Residency project is getting some great submissions, and hopefully we’ll be kicking it off in the next few weeks, and doing a bunch of amazing things for free.

[via Art&Education mailing list]

June 13, 2009July 5, 2018

The Hallway

The Hallway, an installation by Miranda July is a 125 foot hallway with a series of what looks to be hand-painted text panels with English in one direction and Japanese in the other.

It made me think a real-life version of Passage, the lo-fi game by Jason Rohrer.

Promise you’ll watch the whole thing.

June 1, 2009July 5, 2018

Braiding Grass in Windsor

Leesa Bringas (along with some fellow Windsor artists) spent the weekend braiding the long grass at Great Western Park. The process leaves spirals of braided grass around shoots of flowers. It’s quite beautiful and seems meditative (though admittedly, I didn’t venture out to try myself).

Political issues of the strike aside, I quite like seeing the riverfront in a naturalized state, and it’s great that Leesa found such a quiet way to work with the space. Given the other activity in city parks over the weekend, this project is a welcomed intervention to the strike now going into its seventh week.

You can see more photos on Steven’s site, or more video on Darren’s site, or read more about the project on the Windsor Star.

April 13, 2009July 5, 2018

Exhibition Opening at AGW

There’s an opening for two shows in which I’m participating on Friday, April 17, 2009, 7pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

On the first floor is the University of Windsor MFA Graduate Exhibition, Without, featuring documentation from various Broken City Lab projects alongside work by Steven Leyden Cochrane, and Henrjeta Mece, and on the second floor is the 2009 Windsor Biennial, with a large-scale graph outlining ideas and activities for re-imagining cross-border relations alongside too many other great area artists to name. As part of the Biennial, Broken City Lab will be working in Windsor and Detroit towards the realization of some of these activities throughout May and June (more details to follow).

The shows run from April 10 – June 5 and April 17 – July 5 respectively.

April 1, 2009July 5, 2018

Transborder Immigrant Tool

Hundreds of people have died crossing the U.S./Mexico border due to not being able to tell where they are in relation to where they have been and which direction they need to go to reach their destination safely. Initiated by Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theatre and a former member of Critical Art Ensemble, Transborder Immigrant Tool is a cellphone-based software application being developed using the Virtual Hiker Algorithm created by artist Brett Stalbaum to guide immigrants across the US/Mexico border as safely as possible.

I recently saw Ricardo speak at the inter(discplinaries) conference, which was rather incredible, and he mentioned this project in some greater detail than what I’d seen online. This project in particular struck my interest a while ago on my Internet travels, and I’ve been meaning to post about it, but was only recently reminded by the post on Networked_Performance.

January 26, 2009July 5, 2018

Dour Power [Nathan Coley]

Nathan Coley – Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens (2008)

Since one of the recurring project ideas for BCL has been to “send a message to Detroit” (though this particular wording sounds decidedly menacing, which is hilarious and probably unintentional), and since one of the ideas for accomplishing this was to build a lighted sign that would be visible across the Detroit River, I thought it might be appropriate to bring Glaswegian artist Nathan Coley into the discussion.

Nathan Coley – There Will Be No Miracles Here (2006)

Coley is perhaps best known for his incandescent light signs, such as these, and, while the tenor of his work is decidedly more dour than much of what the Lab sets out to do, his work does bring to bear certain issues that might be of interest. In particular, his work explores the ways in which modes of public address—particularly architecture—constitute articulations of collective desire and belief, the “values” of a place. Coley himself has a particular chip on his shoulder re: organized religion (which I, for one, appreciate), but some of the issues he works through might be more broadly-applicable, just the same.

If Broken City means to “disrupt and engage the city,” it’s important first to have a sense of what values are embodied in the existing structures and infrastructure of that city. I’m quite sure I’ve spent a good deal less time thinking about this than many of the other people here, but, so far as I can tell, Windsor’s public front would seem to suggest a firm conviction in the redemptive potential of (1) the automobile, (2) the Casino, (3) trans-border truck traffic, and (4) massage parlors. It’s not quite the historical God and country business that Coley contends with, but I don’t see any reason why the tactics he employs couldn’t be as well-suited to the interrogation of a strip mall as they are to places of worship, etc.

Anyway, this interview, given on the occasion of his nomination for the 2007 Turner Prize, is definitely worth a look, as are pieces like this one from 2006 where he makes use of dazzle camouflage (a geometric camouflage pattern developed in Britain by artist Norman Wilkinson and used extensively during World War I).

Nathan Coley – We Must Cultivate Our Garden (2007)