We spent Friday night in Hamilton at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre as part of their Labour Lounge series (organized by once-Windsorite, Andrew Lochhead).
In a little less than two hours, we led a workshop and explosion of creativity with some amazingly great 13-year-olds. We made banners, two really great banners that will be hung up in the community gallery at the WAHC for a month (soon)!
Broken City Lab is heading up to Hamilton on Friday, November 20th, 2009 to run a workshop/event on communicating through intervention in urban spaces. The workshop is being held at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre as part of their Labour Lounge series, this time in partnership with the Hamilton Youth Arts Network.
This has been the description of the workshop/event and it’s perfectly fitting: “Come on out and learn how art can interact with the urban environment leading to AWESOMENESS!” Oh, and our workshop will lead into the hip hop stylings of Lee Reed; it should be amazing fun!
The details: Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (51 Stuart Street, Hamilton), 7pm – 10:30pm.
Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon.
Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done projecting for the year (with the exception of one more upcoming project with the Border Bookmobile). However, we’re already imagining a continuation of the Cross-Border Communication project for next spring.
Last night was the second iteration of Cross-Border Communication where we sent a variety of messages from Windsor to Detroit. We started with “We’ve Missed You.”
We’ll be doing the final iteration of this suite of Cross-Border Communication tonight (Wednesday) around the usual time (8pm).
Continue reading “Cross-Border Communication: We’ve Missed You (and other things worth saying)”
Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way.
This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.
With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.
Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.
Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.
Tonight, we are going to perform the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication.
Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we have the equipment we need to realize this project.
Cross-Border Communication was initially imagined through a collaborative effort between Broken City Lab and students from the Vincent Massey Secondary School Junior Physics Club in Windsor, Ontario. The project will attempt to hijack and transform communicative efforts between Windsor and Detroit, which has historically been based solely on economic exchange.
The projection will begin at approximately 8pm near the foot of Ouellette Avenue and Riverside Drive in Windsor and will run for approximately 30 minutes. The projection will be visible from Detroit and from the edge of Windsor’s waterfront.
“CreateHere works with one guiding principle in mind: we love our city for what it is, has been and could become.”
The non-profit organization started in 2007 and does things like provide over $300,000 in artists grants to area creatives, connecting talented artists to homes in Chattanooga, and asking everyone in their city what they want for their city.
They also work closely with small businesses in the city on a variety of initiatives, including providing 8-week business planning courses, access to expert advice, and offering peer roundtable discussions once a month. And they do things like the 48Hour Launch (48HL), which unites creative individuals to launch start-up businesses in two days.
They do this based on the responses they get from handing out 25,000 surveys to the community.
They were also recently included in The GOOD 100.
And a few of the Fellows from CreateHere are coming to Windsor (via Detroit) for one day this week (Tuesday, November 10th) to share, brainstorm, discuss, and in all likelihood, inspire (us).
This is going to be our first Micro-Residency and we’re not exactly sure yet what we’ll do for the day, but surely we’ll be touring the city, making many introductions, and figuring out how exactly they’ve been able to do what they have in just two years, and how a similar model of activity might work in Windsor. It’s going to be incredible, stay tuned.
Le programme Panorama au station TFO a fait une série de reportages spéciaux sur l’industrie d’automobile et la crise économique de la ville de Windsor. La journaliste Mélanie Routhier Boudreau a visité Broken City Lab pour filmer l’événement Welcome To The Neighbourhood et conduire une intervue avec moi.
The televison news show Panorama on the TFO network did a series of special reports on the auto industry and economic crisis in Windsor. Journalist Mélanie Routhier Boudreau visited Broken City Lab to interview me and film our event Welcome To The Neighbourhood.
Voici les 3 émissions Spécial Windsor de Panorama via le site-web de TFO:
Here are the 3 episodes of Panorama via the TFO website:
Celui-ci est à propos de l’industrie automotive et la manque emplois:
This episode focuses on auto-worker’s job loss:
Cet émission est à propos de la Place Concorde:
This one is about the french community centre Place Corcorde:
Nous nous trouvons dans le dernier émission, de l’espoir pour Windsor:
We are featured in the last episode, a hope for Windsor:
We spent yesterday evening out around town with our projector and new power inverter, testing sight-lines and potential backup locations for the Cross-Border Communication project.
We’re getting close to knowing exactly how and when we’ll get to do this project, and you can see our research and field tests after the jump.
Continue reading “Projection & Battery Tests Around Downtown”
Something I meant to do a while ago, but I’m doing it now… I’ve uploaded the list of 100 ways we suggested to save the city. The list ranges from the entirely possible to completely imagined, but each one might just make this city a better place, or at least make you feel a little bit better about this city.
There’s a different background colour for each of the 100 ideas, each of which was taken from a Google Map of Windsor. The colour didn’t show up so well in our projection, but it was there.
We’ll also upload the little Max patch we wrote to do the performance … it’s quite easy to use, but maybe would eventually be better to be something written in Processing?
Download the PDF for your enjoyment.