Leesa Bringas’ Postcards to Indian Road project is coming along nicely; some postcards with messages have been returned to her in the mail. Jodi is wrapping up her Sweater Factory with a few completed sweater vests and more to come. BCL Research Fellows Josh and Rosina have been helping the Department of Unusual Certainties with field research, and The Garden Project planters are filling up.
Continue reading “SRSI, Day 14: Field Research, Sweater Vests and Postcards”
For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place in need of new imagination.
We’ve been planning this for months, and we’re incredibly excited to see it finally launch this Friday, June 11, 2010.
Michelle will be posting constantly for the next month, and we’ll be noting the open and close times for each day soon. In the meantime, feel free to download the entire schedule in PDF.
The Schedule: All projects take place in either 406, 410 or 424 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor.
|
Participants |
Dates |
Project Description |
|
Daragh Sankey |
June 10 – 13 June 17 – 20 June 25 – July 11 |
How To Make a Documentary: Live documentation of the residency in its entirety/video editing workshops. |
|
Jolie Inthavong |
June 11 –17
|
The Breakroom: A Profit-Free Cafe and Lunch. |
|
Eric Cheung |
June 11 – 21
|
Creation of an interior urban green park. |
|
Andrea Carvalho |
June 11 – 21
|
A series of actions and tactics challenging Windsor-specific Non-Places. |
|
Julie René de Cotret & Jefferson Campbell-Cooper |
June 11 – 23
|
The Peoples Museum & Fabulations de Windsor: Bilingual community-based story telling and story gathering. |
|
Sara French |
June 11 – July 8
|
Norman Eberstein: An interactive, live performance involving surveillance cameras and a security guard at work. |
|
Nicole Grinstead |
June 13 – 19
|
Swap Shop. |
|
Jodi Green |
June 14 – 25
|
The Sweater Factory: process-based performance involving the unraveling and re-assembly of sweaters. |
|
(Department of Unusual Certainties) |
June 15 – July 11
|
Storefront Success Stories: Based on admiration for the local shopkeeper, the project aims to create new connections, knowledge, and theories between Windsor’s different businesses, people, and sites of productivity. |
|
Kero (Windsor, ON / Detroit, MI) |
June 17 – 20
|
An interactive motion-sensored installation engaging outside pedestrians and interior viewers. |
|
Leesa Bringas (Windsor, ON) |
June 18 – 30
|
Collaborative letter-writing campaign to vacant homes on Indian Road. |
|
Stephen Surlin (Windsor, ON |
June 20 – 29
|
An experimenting / prototyping / recording research phase for the collecting of urban sounds through contact microphones. |
|
Terre Chartrand, Garth Rennie, Zoey Heath, Phil Beaudoin |
June 20 – 27
|
A visual exchange between Kitchener-Waterloo and Windsor: a ride down the highway dialog through photographic and sound experience. |
|
Lea Bucknell |
June 22 – July 1 June 30, 7pm (opening) |
Community-shaped, Interactive Interior garden space. |
|
Thea Jones |
June 23 – 26
|
Multimedia installation using process-based research of the Detroit-Windsor bridge and tunnel which cross the Detroit River. |
|
Thom Provost |
June 24 – 30
|
Storefront projection installation using Google Street View stills of Windsor. |
|
Denise St Marie |
June 25 – 27
|
Talk To Strangers: a text-based outdoor window installation. |
|
Ayesha Drouillard & Nicolette Westfall |
June 27, 28, July 4, 5 (workshops), July 7-8 (show) |
IMAGINATION LAB: walk-in art workshops for kids accompanied by their caregivers. |
|
Merry Ellen Scully Mosna |
June 28 – 29
|
Portraits, Pies and Peace: Sunday afternoon discussions, and sharing of homemade pie, plus some drawing and painting. |
|
Logan Davis |
June 28 – July 1
|
Interactive Light Board Window Installation. |
|
Robin Fitzsimons |
June 28 – July 2
|
Donation-based in-store training to improve gambling skills – geared towards subverting the economy in Windsor. |
|
Doodle Heads: Elizabeth Prosser & Nicolette Westfall |
June 29, 30 (workshops), July 1-July 3 (show)
|
Graffiti Workshops and Showing.
|
|
Joshua Babcock |
June 29 – July 11
|
Invention and Solution Hub (ISH): ongoing brainstorming and mapping activity. |
|
Brad Tinmouth |
June 30 – July 2
|
Pro-Click Factory: digital, interactive open-mic nights. An evening lecture and their techniques for cultivating the best YouTube videos. |
|
Laura Paolini |
July 1 – 11
|
Bell Payphone Labs: PL1999 and GMBLL. Payphone intervention workshops. |
|
And And Collective |
July 3 – 11
|
The Amalgamated City of W: Imagined merging of Windsor and Waterloo through campaign office meetings, consultations and presentations. |
|
Lee Rodney |
July 5 – 8
|
Border Bookmobile: A reading station. |
|
Emily Colombo |
July 5 – 10
|
Multiple public Interventions based on analysis of debt-accumulation, poverty, city-beautification, and community engagement. |
This project is generously supported by the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, Arts Council Windsor & Region, Windsor Pride, and the Ontario Arts Council.
Be it resolved that we’ll be a lot more active on here starting now.
We’ve been overly involved in communicating on Google Wave while trying to keep our brains together for Save the City. With that project winding down, we’ll be shifting more of our research and communications back on here. We’ve missed it.
And Josh said it best when he suggested that we should’ve been using the blog instead of Google Wave the entire time. He’s completely right.
Using that fancy collaborative tool that Google seemed to suggest would be the future of email never really fit into our work flow all that well, but it seemed the most convenient for having notes and research in one place. At first, maybe kidding ourselves, we thought it would do away with multiple emails back and forth, but then we kept forgetting to check our waves, so then we opted-in to receive emails when a Wave had been updated, and so it became really no better than a bunch of emails and some Google documents.
We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. We seem to lose so much in translation from discussions to the next time we meet up or begin working on something new. Should we be saving Word documents to Dropbox? I know Cristina and I have been using it to pass photos back and forth and its fairly convenient, though we haven’t tried working on the documents from there — I suppose we’re using it as a glorified FTP. Google Docs kind of works, but is somewhat annoying to have documents in two places (as I don’t think anyone is really truly committing to the cloud yet). What do you use when you’re working on something with someone else? How do you resolve multiple files with the same names?
With our goal (really this time) of trying to put together some kind of publication soon(ish), what’s going to be the best way to keep ourselves on the same page, or at the very least, merge everything together at the very end?
Any regular readers — what’s your method(s) for collaborating online? BCL, any suggestions for how we should move forward with this?
The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation invites the radical re-imagining of the possibilities for economic stimulus and process-driven practice, situating those very possibilities in the heart of Windsor in vacant storefronts.
Facilitated by Broken City Lab, the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation will call on artists, writers, designers, entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, hobby shops, restauranteurs, librarians, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010.
The residencies will attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a population of people who are continually losing hope for their city.
Details: We will provide a space for you to use, some very modest fees and resources to pull off your project, and a lot of enthusiasm. While we are open to proposals from anyone, preference will be given to Ontario-based persons. If you’re an artist working in a socially-engaged practice, we’d be especially interested to hear from you. Any questions: info@brokencitylab.org.
Deadline: April 15, 2010
The residencies will take place here in Windsor, Ontario in June and July 2010.
Please use the form below to make your proposal.
P.S. You don’t need to write a 20-page proposal, but give us the details that are most pertinent. It would be really helpful to know how long you’d like to use the space, what your activity or project will look like, how you think it’s innovative, and why you think it could do some good in our fair city.
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Submissions are now closed.
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This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
OurGoods, an online barter network, is running a pop-up storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That storefront is called Trade School and it’s a series of classes that centralizes the act of barter and exchange and a pop up classroom in New York City’s Lower East Side.
It works like this: “Take a class every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs.”
We’ve written about this idea of informal education opportunities and spaces before and it remains a kind of long-term hope to see something like this get started in the area.
So, consider this just another post on the ongoing list of inspirational activities that we’d love to imagine having the time to pull off here in Windsor.
Welcome to the Neighbourhood took five groups of brave explorers on an adventure around West Windsor on Monday in order to highlight the potential to pay particular attention to the many things that usually go unnoticed in such a transient area.
Given that the neighbourhood surrounding the University of Windsor is made up mostly of student rental homes and the routes that many folks take to get to and from campus, inevitably we rarely get the chance to see some of the things that make this neighbourhood what it is.
So, two hours, three hundred photos, and many great stories later, our algorithmic walk was a huge success!
A quick warning, after the jump there’s thumbnails for the three hundred photos!!!
Continue reading “Welcome to the Neighbourhood Recap of Awesome Psychogeographic Exploration!!!”