Posted on

Calendars, Notes, Installations, Vinyl, Camouflage, Drywall, Tests, and Hearts

Our rate of posting on here has slowed down considerably since the summer. We’re still busy, it’s just the pace of the work and projects now seems to span longer and longer time frames, and with so many ongoing and overlapping projects, it’s just a lot more challenging to find the time to keep track of it all. We’re actually putting in more time than ever, with Hiba and I meeting regularly two to three days a week and our colleagues joining in when schedules allow. It’s amazingly fun and productive, but harder than ever to document meaningfully.

So, just for a quick look into the last four or five weeks, here’s what we’ve been up to…

Above, we’re planning for the 1W3KND Writing Residency, and we’ll be announcing our participating writers and artists really soon.

We’ve also been hosting biweekly events at CIVIC SPACE. Every other Monday is All Tomorrow’s Problems. We take a lot of notes.

Every other Wednesdays are Zine Nights, and then there’s Skills For Good(s) on a semi-regular Tuesday night schedule. All of these events are free and open to everyone. We usually post the details on the right-hand side column of the front page of our website, and also try to keep civicspace.info up to date. Emphasis on try.

Here are some of the leftovers from Alana Bartol’s recent Skills for Good(s) on Making a Ghillie Suit!

October also allowed us to play host to Sam Lefort returning to take on a project with students from Forster.

The project and exhibition were so great and it was incredibly fun to have Sam back for an entire month.

Here’s just a little peek at her installation.

And, the process of taking down the vinyl to make way for the upcoming Cross-Plotting, opening on Friday, November 9th!

Hiba and I have been working on some other parallel projects for an exhibition in January. Think planes and banners.

Rosina provided the new over-sized pad of paper. It’s been very helpful.

We also still have some postcards left from Sam’s show, if you’d like some.

We’ve been patching the walls, a lot. I think the winter break is going to be set aside for a painting party.

We’ve also had the pleasure of Laura Gentili as a kick-ass studio assistant. She’s assembled furniture, changed door locks, organized, scanned, and sketched her way through the last few weeks, and been awesome the entire way.

Sam was kind enough to leave our space a little nicer than she found it. Above, and installation to brighten up the back office area at CIVIC SPACE.

Also, we’re still working on our window installation, with the help of Paul Anderson. Earlier today, he was testing a contact mic, while also going over details to build the Max patch we’ll actually need.

And this afternoon, Hiba and I also picked up a project that appeared in How to Forget the Border Completely.

This is something that Danielle has been wanting to do forever. Above, a really early prototype.

We’ll eventually laser cut and etch these from aluminum. Installation to follow. Also, in the background, we’re writing. We’re still working on the Homework publication with Brennan and Cholé. And, we’re planning projects into the fall of 2013. It’s good.

Posted on

Justice at Work: An Alternative to the Alternative

Where: Room G110, Windsor Law

Presented by: Danielle Sabelli (Windsor Law Student) and Justin Langlois (Assistant Professor, University of Windsor)

This workshop seeks to reimagine a range of potential, unlikely, and imaginative careers. Members of Broken City Lab will help facilitate an exercise in exploring and unfolding the ways in which the knowledge and practice of law might be applied to new settings, situations, and social realities. Are there legal careers yet to be defined or is there a need to forget the ideas of a law office, court system, and legislative boundaries all together? Join us for an engaging and challenging discussion towards articulating an alternative to the alternative.

Danielle and Justin are co-founders of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, and creative practice leading towards civic change.

More information: jaw2012.wordpress.com

Posted on

Cross-plotted: Detroit to Windsor Exhibition Opens November 9th

Cross-plotted: Detroit to Windsor is an exhibition by a group of Master of Architecture students at the University of Michigan. The group is formulated around a research practice that investigates the unfolding circumstances of the city through full-scale-work: making is used as a means to reveal, critique, and alter the realities of our urban settings. The exhibition focuses on specific plots of land in Detroit by exploring their material and atmospheric conditions as well as their immaterial regulations, degrees of neglect, and idiosyncrasies. The capsules work to re-frame materials from the plots in Detroit within their displaced context in Windsor.

The group is collaborating with the artist-led interdisciplinary collective Broken City Lab, as well as the Creative Rights legal team. The attitudes and research practices developed for this work will inform a yearlong thesis studio.

The exhibit opens November 9th at 7pm at Broken City Lab’s Civic Space: 411 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor.

Exhibitors:

John Guinn

Tony Killian

Anastasia Kostrominova

Emily Kutil

Sarah Nowaczyk

Harry Solie

Grant Weaver

Andrew Wolking

Ning Zhou

Professor: Catie Newell

Posted on

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

Posted on

Open Studio – Civic Boredom: Street Remedies

Mark your calendars for Friday, October 26th at 7pm for an open studio of our artist-in-residence, Sam Lefort. You’ll remember Sam from earlier in the summer when she hosted a rapid fire series of workshops on urban ecology at CIVIC SPACE. She’ll be presenting a new project realized over the course of her residency in collaboration with students from J.L. Forster Secondary School. You’ll have a chance to meet Sam and the students!

The project, CIVIC BOREDOM: STREET REMEDIES,  features a series of temporary street art stencils installed around the city. Working through a series of workshops with Sam, the students created powerful text-based visual statements that will get residents and visitors starting to think about issues impacting youth.

Using custom card stock stencils and environmentally friendly, hand-made chalk paint (corn starch and water), students made their marks (temporarily) around downtown Windsor to try to bring some attention to their hopes and concerns for their futures and the future of the city.

Here are just a few of the installations around the city. LESS TALKING MORE DOING.

I WISH YOU COULD SEE THE POTENTIAL.

OUR FUTURE.

THEY JUST KEEP FIGHTNIG (sic).

See you Friday!

Posted on

Interactive Window Installation, progressing beyond the Max/MSP solution

After our post a few weeks ago about a new interactive window installation, we had some interesting and helpful suggestions, but one email in particular stood out.

Paul Anderson wrote to us briefly with an offer to help and after a quick introduction of his incredible depth of knowledge of all things electronic shortly thereafter, he showed up yesterday with the sensor pictured above. Basically, it’s used for industrial automation and I can’t recall the name of it, but see that red light, that’s the important part.

Pictured above, Paul is holding up this device to the window on the inside of CIVIC SPACE and our artist-in-residence, Sam Lefort, places her hand on the window from outside, and that little light turns from green to red. I can’t recall exactly what it’s detecting (I’m hoping Paul can fill in some blanks in the comments), but essentially by dialing in the right sensitivity, you can get this thing to act as a trigger when someone’s hand is in front of it through the window. This gets us past trying to use computer vision in Max to detect the presence of a hand, which would have run into some challenges dealing with the range of lighting conditions we deal with at the window (pictured below).

Still assuming that  we’ll use Max to record the audio (as Stephen had suggested in the comments) and add some other useful automation like date/time, possibly some early EQ or amplification, and maybe even setting this thing up so it will tweet us when it’s recording and automatically upload it to our servers, or maybe something else entirely.

Anyways, I’m confident in saying that I’ve never been so excited to see a little red light turn on.

Posted on

Last Week & Tonight: All Tomorrow’s Problems

Last Monday night,  a small group of us gathered around the table to talk about All Tomorrow’s Problems. This is an open event that invites anyone to attend and think of this as a very loosely organized group 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. It picks up again tonight, Monday, October 15 at 7pm!

Huge thanks to Sam Lefort, Eric Boucher and Dan McCafferty for joining me and Danielle. The goal of this biweekly design night is to articulate and imagine the problems and solutions facing the city in a longer horizon, and which have already begun to reveal themselves.

The topic of the first-week: youth retention. It’s not a secret that this has been an area of ongoing concern for me, personally, and so it was great to talk through ideas of how we could address this problem, without them being tethered to the all-too-familiar limits and and realities regularly articulated in the community.

Some of the notes from the evening … I particularly liked the idea of making it easier for people to find their place in the community here, rather than assuming their place is waiting for them somewhere else. The big question framing the entire discussion — what are the barriers in place that prevent recent graduates from staying here?

Also discussed — more focus on mentorship, a guerilla marketing campaign for parents to “talk to their kids about Windsor,” a head-hunter for every single graduate, an effort to more coherently articulate the local, and a completely revamped set of bylaws to jumpstart entrepreneurship here that doesn’t look like entrepreneurship in other cities and places.

All Tomorrow’s Problems isn’t aiming to necessarily solve the problems we discuss, but instead, open up an imaginative dialogue around these issues. Solving problems is over-rated anyways, asking the right questions is so much more important. Around the table on the first night, we had artists, designers, filmmakers, teachers, and a soon-to-be lawyer. In my mind, that’s a dangerously good combination of people asking a variety of questions. But, I’m also pretty sure that having you around the table would make it even better.

We’re not dismissing or avoiding actionable ideas, we just don’t want to get caught up in the limits of logistics and pragmatism — the city already seems to do that really well. See you tonight at 7pm.

Posted on

Help Wanted: Ad-hoc volunteer studio assistant

We’re looking for an ad-hoc volunteer studio assistant to help us do some or all of the following:

-Visual and archival research
-Building and making things
-Silk screening
-Scanning and archiving
-Basic print and/or web design
-Materials research
-General office assistance
-Installation assistance

In return for your one or two day a week time commitment, we offer the following:

-Fun and free coffee
-Experience in a professional artist-run-centre and collective
-An eclectic mix of background music including jazz, hip hop, and metalcore
-Dangerously good reference letters
-Invaluable learning opportunities that will help you make more art, be an incredibly good organizer, and maybe even get you into grad school

Preferred Qualifications:

-High school diploma, first-year University/College, or otherwise very mature
-Incredibly punctual
-Drivers license and access to a vehicle
-General care and attention to detail
-Very positive and helpful attitude
-Focused
-Self-directed
-Well organized
-Experience with power tools and/or Adobe Creative Suite

Start Date: As soon as possible
End Date: End of April 2013 (with possible contract renewal)

Interested? Please fill out the form below, ASAP!

[gravityform id=”11″ name=”Studio Assistant” ajax=”true”]

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.