As if you needed another reason to switch over to Gmail … I present the BCL-v1 Gmail theme.
BCL Gmail Theme
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours are back on for Tuesday, February 24th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. There will be lots of things on the table, as we get closer to our upcoming show. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!
Brainstorming Community Gardens
Darren, Josh, and I met with some folks from the Sandwich Community Health Centre and Maya from FedUp to start discussing community gardens. The meeting went well, serving as a good starting point to start figuring out what we might be able to do in Sandwich. The SCHC is working on a site on Prince Road, so trying to get something at the riverfront shouldn’t overlap with their efforts.
After the meeting we did a site visit to start brainstorming, taking some photos and making some notes. Josh and I did some sketches and really rough mockups to try to start imaging some potentials for the garden. We liked the idea of circular planters, similar to the Victory Gardens, I’ve posted on previously, so that’s what you’re seeing in the aerial photo above, with the planters being those 12 small dots near the windmill. Though, the planters would probably vary in size, and in general would be larger than what’s mocked-up above.
Ideally, a garden that we initiate can act as a pilot project for the rest of the city. There’s a long way to go with this project, but I wanted to make this first post to mark the start.
No Office Hours This Week
The University of Windsor is on break this week, so we’re going to take a break too. We won’t be meeting for Office Hours this week, though I’ll be giving a presentation at Artcite on Thursday, as part of Talk20, speaking about Broken City Lab.
Office Hours will start up again next Tuesday, February 24th, at 7pm.
Making Things Happen (For A Week Straight)
From March 2 – 6, 2009, BROKEN CITY LAB be taking over the Lebel Gallery as a project site. Though we’re using the gallery, this isn’t going to be a normal exhibition; the space is going to function as a big collective office / studio for everyone, so we can work on a number of ongoing projects simultaneously and in a sustained way. Consider it week-long office hours.
And instead of an opening, we’re going to work in the Noiseborder space in the basement of Lambton Tower on Thursday, March 5th at 7pm, in a yet-to-be-announced activity (stay tuned).
Mark the dates and leave some time to come by and participate. We’ll be posting more details on everything happening that week soon.
The LED Sign is Finished!!!
It’s taken a number of weeks, but we finished wiring the LED sign at tonight’s Office Hours! It was a pretty incredible moment to plug in the sign, turn off the lights, and realize that we made this come together. I’m really, really, really happy with how it turned out!!! There are still a few more things we need to do before this project is completely done, and I would like to try it on batteries, but now that we know how bright it is, I think we’ll come up with some more LED projects soon.
How to: Text on Ice
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on making blocks of ice with letters and text embedded in them to create temporary street art. I think this idea came out of working with wheat paste, realizing the enjoyment of working in public spaces, and wanting to continue to work throughout the winter.
I liked developing and working on this project for a number of reasons—especially the durational experience of freezing a number of blocks of ice, cutting out the paper letters, then slowly covering those letters with thin layers of ice, eventually securely embedding them into the blocks.
After the jump, there are some step-by-step photos and documentation of our learning process.
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, February 10th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll finish up some projects and brainstorm some others. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!
Moving Along with Flagging Tape and LEDs
Broken City Lab Office Hours on Tuesday were hugely productive. We completely finished getting all the resistors on the LED sign, measured out all the letters with flagging tape for the EC Row Project, organized some logistics for the planning stages of a couple other upcoming projects, and figured out the title for our upcoming show in the Lebel Gallery.
Lots of photos after the jump.
Save A City
At Windsor’s riverfront, SAVE A CITY, installed this afternoon. We opted out of using monofilament to hang the blocks of ice because there was a nice snowbank already there, and probably the last thing the Detroit River needs is more garbage in it. I’ll post some photos of the process of making these soon (definitely before the weather gets too warm).