We’re pleased to host the Green Corridor Explores exhibition, opening on Thursday, November 27th at 4pm, which features a series of projects, proposals, and ideas developed over the Fall 2012 semester with Professor Rod Strickland.
The opening event on Thursday will have students on hand to discuss their projects, which focus on sustainable urban practices in downtown Windsor.
Monday night was another huge brainstorming session with some new and old friends. We spent most of the evening trying to figure out the potentials in doing something like a floating sculpture in the Detroit River. We’ve discussed this before, and it seems that the space between what we’d really like to do and reality is quite large.
That’s part of the fun though, how do you generate some kind of communication across borders without alerting the authorities, or how do you manage the headaches of going through the proper channels?
At some point we headed down to the basement and looked at a kayak Rod made when he was in grade 8 (pictured above). We wondered if it could act as a potential substrate for one part of the project. Though we talked about projects like the Waterpod Project or Andrea Zittel’s Pocket Property Floating Island project, it became fairly clear that anything we could do in the short-term would need to involve a kind of very limited-duration kind of exchange between Windsor and Detroit.
We also talked about a kind of guided tours of neighbourhoods in Windsor and Detroit (and while these have already been happening), the difference here would be to exchange with a group of folks from Detroit, so that we give them a list or map to see parts of our city, while we get to head across for a neighbourhood level tour of places in Detroit!
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.
In tandem with The Open Corridor and Drive-Through Symphony events, Green Corridor has also installed another exhibit, Open Community Video. This installation features videos from local students and community members. The videos are rear-projected through the front window of one of the The Green Corridor’s new Ecohouses located at 372 California Ave.
Open Community Video will take place Thursday (tonight!), September 24th from 8-10pm and Friday, September (tomorrow!) 25th from 8-10pm. If you have any short videos that you would like to contribute to this installment, just bring a dvd copy of it to the house tonight or tomorrow night!
David Blatherwick‘s Talking Trees was recently installed as part of the Green Corridor’s Open Corridor Festival. A small number of trees along Huron Church, south of College Ave are equipped with outdoor speakers that loop audio of children complaining. Josh played a big part in realizing this project, as he was one of the almost 60 students to take the Green Corridor class during intersession, so if I’m missing any details, I’m sure he’ll fill in the blanks.
Blatherwick, a former member of the Visual Arts faculty at the University of Windsor (he’s now at Waterloo), suggests that these trees have a lot to complain about, being alongside the road that still carries around 10,000 trucks daily to the Ambassador Bridge.
The speakers are loud enough that you can catch bits of it while driving by, but it’s worth a walk-thru to experience not just Talking Trees, but the other works that are part of Open Corridor.
I’ll be posting more on the other works in the coming days.