This week I decided to do something productive in my spare time and I ended up with this! I made some message boxes and put them around the city.
These boxes work much in the same way that those numbered tickets at the deli do. However, instead of pulling down and getting a number, the strips of paper here contain messages.
To continue the progress of our cardboard letter project, I took the remaining pieces home on the weekend to finish T, E, and R.
Though the first stage may be over, there’s still plenty left to work on in terms of researching and experimenting with various materials which I looked into as well.
As you can see from a post we made a few days ago, we’ve been working on constructing a large-scale cardboard text statement. My job over the weekend was to re-do the first 3D letter we made–we made the letter ‘m’ too small horizontally and didn’t want it to be prone to falling over when someone sneezed next to it. This was my first time constructing a full letter, so I had to teach myself the ropes.
Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon.
Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done projecting for the year (with the exception of one more upcoming project with the Border Bookmobile). However, we’re already imagining a continuation of the Cross-Border Communication project for next spring.
Last night was the second iteration of Cross-Border Communication where we sent a variety of messages from Windsor to Detroit. We started with “We’ve Missed You.”
We’ll be doing the final iteration of this suite of Cross-Border Communication tonight (Wednesday) around the usual time (8pm).
Continue reading “Cross-Border Communication: We’ve Missed You (and other things worth saying)”
Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way.
This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.
With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.
Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.
Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.