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Shaping our City: Brainstorming Session at Civic Space Tomorrow!

BCL Workshop

Friday, January 3rd, 2013 at 7pm – CIVIC Space (411 Pelissier Street, Windsor, Ontario)

As static as Windsor might seem at times, it is definitely going through some changes. Our downtown is a lot brighter because of the large screens on the Windsor Star building, the University of Windsor’s downtown campus opens next year, the aquatic centre is opening this year, we have a new bridge that may be completed in 2020, the new Penalty Box location is reviving a historical building on University Avenue West, and the old Grace Hospital has been torn down.

In the vein of our previous project, City Counseling (Session #1), we’ll be talking through new ideas and changes happening in the city, as a group. The goal of this brainstorm session is to bring people together, learn something new about Windsor, and contribute creative perspectives for shaping this city. I hope you can make it down to Civic Space tomorrow at 7 pm (January 3rd) to contribute to these conversations.

This event is a collaboration with Life In a Border Town.

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Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land)

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With artists Broken City Lab (Canada), Campus in Camps (Palestine), Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi (Pakistan/USA), Willie Doherty (Ireland), Marcos Ramirez Erre(Mexico/USA), Sanaz Mazinani (Canada), Christopher McNamara (Canada/USA), Dylan Miner (USA/Canada), Ed Pien (Canada), Leila Sujir/Maria Lantin (Canada)

Border Cultures is a three-part annual exhibition that brings together regional, national and international artists to examine the complex and shifting notions of national boundaries. It is an exhibition-in-progress, conceptualized as a research-based platform for artists and cultural producers to explore and examine the border through different lenses. Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land) will be followed by Part Two (work, labour) in 2014 and Part Three (security, surveillance) in 2015. In this exhibition artists reimagine the pattern of crisscrossing national boundaries as way to engage in dialogues and share knowledge. With a goal to mobilize and connect the ongoing critical dialogues on national boundaries in Windsor with diverse narratives and experiences of border contexts in different parts of the world.

The exhibition opens on Friday, January 25 at 7pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

Highlights of this exhibition include the Canadian premier of early black and white photographic works by Irish artist Willie Doherty shot in the contested city of Derry, Postcards from the Edge of the Tijuana and San Diego border by Marcos Ramirez Erre, an exchange of best-friend lockets between Detroit and Windsor and a mobile print lab by Métis artist Dylan Miner in collaboration with youth from the Turtle Island Education Centre, Windsor, and much more. The exhibition is curated by Srimoyee Mitra.

Also, our friends…

The Border Bookmobile Public Archive and Reading Room
Organized by Lee Rodney in collaboration with Mike Marcon

This project aims to reposition local history within the context of international borders, chronicling the shifting relationship between the two communities as post-9/11 border policies continue to drive a wedge between them. Over the past three years, the Border Bookmobile traveled throughout Windsor and Detroit as a mobile exhibition and discussion platform and cross-border community archive of books, artist projects, photographs, videos, maps and ephemera about the urban history of Windsor-Detroit and border regions in other parts of the world. At the AGW, the Border Bookmobile will host a series of discussions and workshops with the goal of collecting, organizing and synthesizing knowledge about this border region to contextualize globally, and chronicle, locally, the changing perceptions of the border.

And…

March 8-10, Diversions: Detroit-Windsor Conversations on Borders, Traffic and Circulation, An Experiential Symposium.
Organized by the Art Gallery of Windsor, IN/TERMINUS: Media, Art, and Urban Ecologies (University of Windsor), The Border Bookmobile (Windsor-Detroit) and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (McGill University).
Panellists include artists Marcos Ramirez Erre, Dylan Miner and Christopher McNamara as well as theorists Will Straw, (McGill University) and Janine Marchessault (York University). FREE admission

March 9, 12-1pm, Curator’s tour of Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land)
FREE admission

March 15, 2-4pm: Connections and Disconnections in the Windsor-Detroit Area This is a one day workshop run by Broken City Lab and ArtsCorpsDetroit to arrange an exchange for people without passports in Windsor-Detroit area.
FREE admission

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Tuesday Afternoon: Work continues, now with Postcards and the Library Cards

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (1)

Lucy stopped by this morning to keep cutting. Hiba and I painted the letters.

White it is.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (2)

We had a lot of leftover wall paint, which means we not only have more than enough paint, but the letter faces will gain a bit of rigidity and protection since it’s epoxy paint.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (4)

Hiba paints.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (3)

After trying to paint the letters on the wall, we shifted to a make-shift table. Easier to avoid paint running.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (5)

We made a drying rack.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (6)

Protection. Recommended originally by Jennifer Willet. We should actually have more of these on hand.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (7)

The drying rack doing it’s job.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (8)

But, of course, it didn’t fit many letters, so we just started lying them out on the table.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (9)

Two brushes — these might be leftovers from Make This Better.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (10)

Also, picked up the postcards from Dan Bombardier, while he installed for an upcoming show at Artcite.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (11)

Also, Daragh Sankey posted another section of In-Store, his documentary on SRSI … we’ll post it on here.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (12)

Stack of postcards!

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (13)

Oh, and our library cards for the Letter Library.

Printed postcards, gas masks, paint, assembly line (14)

The back of the postcards, as you can see — lots to come!

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Border Town Design Jam

photo courtesy of http://dividedcities.com/

One of our dear friends (and Homework presenter), Tim Maly, from the great city of Toronto is hosting an event continuing off of the work he did with the Border Town Design Studio last year.

Here’s the details, if you’re in the area (and here’s more detailed information):

BORDER TOWN DESIGN JAM

From Friday March 2, 2012 to Saturday March 3, teams of clever people will get together to solve a User Experience problem relating to border towns. Would you like to be one of them?

Border Town Design Jam (#btdj)
Using border towns as a point of entry, we’ll approach political geography as a design problem. This design jam will take place over 1 day (and a half), from March 2 to 3, 2012. Tickets are now available on Eventbrite. This event is presented in collaboration with ThingTank Lab.

Interested in seeing and hearing the results of this jam? We’re opening up our final show and tell to the general public – get your free tickets to attend here!

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Topic
The topic and design challenge will be revealed at the kickoff party on Friday March 2, 2012, 6PM. However, here’s a hint:  ”Everyone must pass”

About Design Jams
Design Jams are one-or-two-day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging User Experience (UX) challenges. Learn more about Design Jams. 

Who should attend Design Jams
Anyone really – Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) & Design Students, Interaction Designers, UX Researchers, Information Architects, UI Designers, Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Hardware Hackers, Policy Nerds, Developers + more… The day aims to improve collaboration skills and help attendees learn and practice various UX techniques including but not limited to Research, Brainstorming, Sketching, Wireframing and Prototyping.

What happens at a Design Jam?
Attendees sign up in advance. Upon arrival they assign themselves to teams based on the skills they could contribute and what they’d like to learn. Teams are then presented a design challenge that they tackle by doing research, sketching, guerrilla testing and other UX techniques. They are encouraged to share their process and ideas halfway through enabling them to get feedback from other teams as well as other mentors in attendance during the day. The day concludes with final presentations to the entire group. Outcomes could take the form of sketches, storyboards, a video or even a prototype – whatever communicates the idea best.

What happens to the ideas we come up with?
All output materials will be shared on the Border Town and ThingTank Lab websites, and teams will be asked to compose a blog post about their design process and ideas.

Licensing
To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all outputs, visualizations and other contributions made during the day must be contributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. This basically means anyone can use ideas generated at the Design Jam, as long as they credit the original authors.

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Organizers
Feel free to contact any of the following with questions and queries.

From Border Town design studio (@dividedcities)
Emily Horne @birdlord & Tim Maly @doingitwrong

From ThingTank Lab (@thingtankTO)
Marie-Eve Belanger @wrongposture

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Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant

Broken City Lab is launching a new micro-grant program and we need you to apply.

As a part of our upcoming publication, How to Forget the Border Completely, The Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant gives you the opportunity to cross the Windsor-Detroit border.  We’re looking for a variety of experiences gained from crossing the border, so you can cross for whatever reason you’d like.

We want people to participate in activities that they would do if there wasn’t a border, and we want all types of people to apply. We want people to get involved who don’t cross often, who do cross often, or who have never crossed before.

The grant is offered on a first come, first serve basis, and comes in the form of a roundtrip tunnel bus ticket.

So, if you can get to the Detroit-Windsor border, and you’re interested in participating, fill out the Cross-Border Micro Grant Application below!

Continue reading “Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant”

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Mid-Week Work Period

Yesterday a group of us met at the School of Visual Arts building to work on completing the sub-projects which will appear in our How to Forget the Border Completely publication. It is exciting to see our ideas come to fruition and our publication take shape. We are now at the stage of roughly laying out the publication and seeing how our individual works get along with each other.

Pictured above: Sara and Hiba work on laying out the HFBC publication in InDesign.

Continue reading “Mid-Week Work Period”

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Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell

Meeting outside is the greatest. There’s talk of building some kind of mobile table / bistro to make this possible in other locations, but I suppose that’s further down on the to-do list.

For now, we’re immersed in bringing together research and inventions around our How to Forget the Border Completely project to pull into a publication.

Above, we brought lots of reference material on Friday night.

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BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)

We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices.

Back at the Ecohouse to try to get the plan together to work on a video we’ve been tossing around for a while — final decisions have been elusive, so we put it on hold for now. Instead, we headed out to the front lawn and reminded ourselves of the what we can do with How to Forget the Border Completely.

Executing these projects is just a matter of carving out a day … we spend time planning, testing, experimenting, brainstorming because we know we’re more curious together and our collective curiosity is the driver for every one of these projects. It’s not about the solutions, it’s about the questions.

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The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro

Lee Rodney teaches one of the best courses at the University of Windsor, Border Culture. I took the course in the fall of 2010 and wrote a book: The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor.

The book serves as documentation and comparative analysis of three specific forgotten spaces in downtown Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Each of these are former sites of railway lines that ran across the Detroit River into Michigan at the height of industrialization in the first quarter of the twentieth century, but are now closed up dead ends and dead zones, unlit at night and undetectable from street view due to their below street level geography.

These spaces have a transient quality, as people exist in them only while passing through, usually as quickly as they can in order to reach a safer location. The contents of this book are based on my own personal experience in and around these spaces as a young adult white female artist, including historical research on the areas as well as references from multiple disciplines including activism, art, urban planning, geography, design, visual culture, gender and feminist studies. The invisible borders embedded within the fabric of these hidden, forgotten underused and misused spaces is examined.

Over the course of the next month, I will be posting chapters of the book with images on a weekly basis. However, I would like to introduce the book by providing some info and context around what I was reading prior to and during the research phase of this project.

So, without further adieu, a few books that informed my book:

Continue reading “The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro”