Last Wednesday at The Green Corridor‘s Drive-thru Symphony event I showed a projection entitled Rolling Economy. This site-specific piece served as a digital representational count of the Windsor-Detroit border trade that passes through the corridor. The piece, which lasted about an hour, was visible to those in cars and trucks coming off of the Ambassador Bridge.
TODAY in Windsor, there’s an incredible amount of activity happening. The Green Corridor will host a talk / workshop from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grant officers, two artist performances, and one huge outdoor event to bring culture to the NAFTA freeway.
Lee Rodney will launch her Border Bookmobile—a Windsor-made 1993 Plymouth Voyager stocked with a collection of artist books, theoretical texts, maps, and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world.
Jennifer Willet will conduct ongoing laboratory research and hold a bio-art workshop with the general public in the presentation of her work InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies. This piece explores the laboratory removed from its sterilized artificial setting and placed in an outside world full of environmental organisms and ecologies.
The Green Corridor along with composer Brent Lee, visual artist Sigi Torinus, Assumption High School musicians, What Seas What Shores, CJAM 91.5fm, and others will create a one-hour performance of music and visuals that interact with the passing traffic on Huron Church Road near the Pedestrian Overpass. Drivers can tune-in to the performance in near-realtime and contribute to the Drive-Thru Symphony by honking their horns, or revving their engines, or generally making noise. Broken City Lab will also be contributing through a number of projects by us as individuals.
Here’s the schedule:
1:00 – 2:30 – Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council / Integrated Arts Programs Information Session / Room 115 LeBel Building, University of Windsor
3:00 – 6:00 – Border Bookmobile, Lee Rodney / InsideOut: Labratory Ecologies, Jennifer Willet
8:00 – 9:30 – Drive thru Sympony Performance / Nature Bridge Pedestrian Overpass / Huron Church Rd. at Millen St.
This is going to be an amazing event, dare I say, history-making. You need to be there.
This week is Humanities Week 2009, presented by Humanities Research Group (HRG), and it’s focusing on urbanism, cities, and the past and the future of Windsor / Detroit.
Here’s the rundown of the events, which I copied / cut / pasted, so please excuse the list:
Tuesday 22 September • Philosophers’ Café 8pm • Phog Lounge, 157 University Avenue West – Come participate in a wide-ranging discussion concerning cities, their possible futures, and the future of Windsor with Justin Langlois [Broken City Lab], Tom Lucier [Phog, tomlucier.com], Melinda Munro [City of Windsor], and Jeff Noonan [Philosophy, University of Windsor]. Cash bar.
Wednesday 23 September • MASSH Lecture on the history of medicine in Windsor and Detroit, in a talk entitled “Border Cities Medicine: Towards a History of Medical Practitioners in Windsor.” Lecture 4.30pm • Room 1115, Medical Education Building, University of Windsor
Thursday 24 September • HRG Distinguished Speakers’ Series 7.30pm, Jerry Herron, professor of English and American Studies, Wayne State University, will give a talk entitled, “Borderama Detroit,” which will explore the city as a spectacle, and what Detroit, that ‘life-in-death’ city, means for the future of urban areas around the world. • Freed Orman Centre, Assumption University
Friday 25 September • HRG Colloquium 10am • Location to be communicated – “How Not to See Detroit: What Tourists Always Get Wrong When They Come to Look at Us, and What One Got Exactly Right” is a wide-ranging discussion with Jerry Herron about Detroit and the way it has been documented by the photographer Corine Vermeulen-Smith. Seating is limited; contact the HRG office for more information and to register.
There’s a lot going on this week, so contact HRG for more information on any specific part of the activity you see listed above, but plan to attend at least one of these events if your schedule permits!
Hundreds of people have died crossing the U.S./Mexico border due to not being able to tell where they are in relation to where they have been and which direction they need to go to reach their destination safely. Initiated by Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theatre and a former member of Critical Art Ensemble, Transborder Immigrant Tool is a cellphone-based software application being developed using the Virtual Hiker Algorithm created by artist Brett Stalbaum to guide immigrants across the US/Mexico border as safely as possible.
I recently saw Ricardo speak at the inter(discplinaries) conference, which was rather incredible, and he mentioned this project in some greater detail than what I’d seen online. This project in particular struck my interest a while ago on my Internet travels, and I’ve been meaning to post about it, but was only recently reminded by the post on Networked_Performance.