I’ve been meaning to take a look at this location for a potential projection project that we’re looking into for Harvesting the F.A.M. The wall is dark brick, but we need to work out the logistics of projecting onto such a surface anyways for another project we’re working towards.
What exactly we’ll be projecting is still up the air, but we plan to be on the roof of Empire Lounge for an hour or so on one of the nights of the F.A.M. Fest. We’ll keep you posted.
I hope you’ll forgive us for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been on a film shoot all day, everyday for the last few weeks, while other BCL folks have been traveling, moving, working, and studying, and so meeting even once a week has been a challenge. Thankfully, school is literally a couple days away and with it comes some kind of stability in a schedule.
However, we’ve still been trying to get some things done, mostly it’s been this planters project and planning for our upcoming event, Welcome to the Neighbourhood. On Thursday, we did some more field tests with our planters where we’re discovering which plants have been doing better and trying to determine why.
Continue reading “Field Tests & Exampling: Moving the Planters”
We’re hosting an algorithmic adventure to get to know our new neighbourhood. This adventure will be a psychogeographic walk of sorts starting at Broken City Lab Headquarters, which will take participants around the campus, student ghettos, the sculpture garden, Indian Road, and all of the little things that make this area worth exploring.
Everyone who shows up will get into small groups and share a list of instructions that will take them around the neighbourhood. These instructions will involve moving in specific directions, taking on specific tasks, and generally paying specific attention to the area around you. At each step in the algorithm, you’ll be asked to take a single photograph. At the end of the algorithm, when you return to BCL HQ, we’ll download your photos and upload them to our site to create a set of very specific views of the neighbourhood and generate a body of research on West Windsor much greater than we could ever do on our own.
This event will launch our fall activities and be the first of many open-house type events / workshops / office hours for 2009 / 2010!!!
The details:
Monday, September 14, 2009
Start at 362 California Ave at 7pm
End at 362 California Ave around 9pm
Bring your camera and bring a friend!
Andrew Hunter’s DodoLab, an experimental co-creative lab for engaging with communities, organizations and events, headed east last week to do a series of workshops and activities around Charlottetown’s ecology and environment.
Our schedules couldn’t align (again) so we missed an amazing trip to PEI, but DodoLab carried out a massive seed bomb workshop using our recipe and offered hundreds of seed bombs to the folks passing through the market!
Alongside the seed bombs, there were a number of other projects led by fellow DodoLab researchers and students from CHARTS that looked at landscape, the experimental farm, cartography, and the wire worm (a species that can decimate a potato crop).
So, while we missed another round of collaborative research opportunities, we’re looking into further collaborations between DodoLab and Broken City Lab, hopefully picking up later this fall or winter based a little closer to home.
Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden.
We’re doing some field tests of our magnetic planters with some plants in them. Basically, we want to test to make sure the soil isn’t drying out too quickly and we’re also checking to see how well some plants respond to transplants. Above, you can see there’s a wire around the planter that helps it to keep its shape—some of the planters without a wide edge on either side are more prone to open up really wide at the top, which makes it difficult for the soil to fill the planter uniformly. Without it, the soil eventually sinks and adding any more soil would risk making the planter too heavy for the magnet.
Michelle’s running these tests, checking on the plants daily and testing a few varieties of planter shapes in preparation of the installation of all of our planters sometime in the next week or so.
Another day at BCL HQ and some more progress on this ongoing magnetic planters project. Michelle and I finished putting in the remainder of our magnets into our plastic bag planters, but there are still some more planters left over. So, with more rare-earth magnets now on the way, we’ll finish up the rest when they arrive next week.
We also have a test planter in the wild now to make sure it works as we assume it’s going to work. The other tests that I’ve done indoors have been fine, with some of the mint I transplanted actually taking root, which is really exciting! It was quite interesting to see all of these individually made designs and see the range of techniques that everyone used when making the planters as Michelle and I worked with just about every one today… we imagine it will look quite great to see them all installed (temporarily) in one place filled with plants before they’re sent off to other magnetic surfaces across the city.
As summer rolls on, we’re continuing our work with the magnetic planters, though we now have the benefit of a front porch to enjoy the evening weather while doing so. Michelle, Josh, and I spent Monday night working on embedding the magnets into the plastic bag planters along with some more writing. We also moved some more stuff into our office and began to organize ourselves. Michelle started out by sorting the planters that had tabs on them, which allow us to fold them over the magnets and use the iron to keep them in place.
Michelle and Josh took turns with the iron—it’s been a while since we’ve worked on them, and with a different iron, we had to work out the kinks of getting the heat exactly right.
We finished up 25 planters, some of them requiring two magnets. Michelle and I will continue on with the rest sometime this week.
Josh and I spent some of the day in the heat collecting some interesting flowers and plants to transplant for our magnetic planters project. Overall, it was fairly successful, as we did learn quite a lot about transplanting, but we’re still going to be looking for some more plants to finish up this stage of the project (hopefully) in the next week or so.
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks settling into our new headquarters, working on applications and ideas for the fall and winter. We’ve also cleared our consultancy out of the downtown space, seeing as Visual Fringe is over and it was high on the to-do list. Having a dedicated space has been incredible so far, and all we’ve done is basically set up some tables and go over some paperwork.
Needless to say that come September, with more people back in town and our schedules better aligned. our new space is going to be even more amazing.
So, as most of what we’ve been doing is somewhat scattered and in numerous Word and Excel documents and in the mail and on someone else’s desk, here’s a brief overview of our activities as of late.