It was Monday night and Karlyn’s Birthday, so Hiba and Kevin brought a fun cake.
Other things happened as well, and strangely, or maybe expectedly, now that the semester’s done and since we didn’t meet at the very end of the week, we had a marathon five hour meeting. It was so great!!!
Continue reading “BCL Report: April 11, 2011 (oh, the logistics)”
We were a few people short of a full crew (Michelle was sick, Danielle was away, Rosina was on the line, and it was Cristina’s birthday), but Josh, Kevin, Hiba, Karlyn and I still made the most of our Friday night studio collaboration spectacular by putting some focus on our large-scale letters project for CAFKA.
With the semester wrapping up in just a few more weeks, we’re really looking forward to having a bit more time and brain space to work on all of these projects.
We met earlier this week for the last time before the new year. We had a really busy year, but there’s even more ahead in 2011. We spent the evening trying to plan for a number of upcoming projects, including our recently funded How to Forget the Border Completely, and a project for CAFKA, and another proposal for a project next fall.
Michelle and I spent hours and hours together yesterday. With everyone’s schedules fairly ridiculous at the moment, we’re trying to steal what little time we can to keep working. Lately, the time that we’ve all spent together has been framed exclusively almost exclusively by planning for Save the City or organizing the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, and so we’re usually burned out after a couple hours of that. Last night though, we pushed past the moment of getting burned out, and I think we got somewhere because of it.
We started our Friday night with a Skype call to Chris from the Department of Unusual Certainties regarding their project as part of the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation (they are very enthusiastic, and their projects is going to be really, really great), had some dinner, tried to imagine what will come after SRSI, and then moved on to sorting out the billboards for the last part of Save the City.
We had a lot of bad ideas. Had we stopped earlier on, today and tomorrow would have been filled with some scrambling efforts to find the finish the design, emailing it out to everyone, trying to integrate everyone’s suggestions (and likely failing to do it well), sending it out again, getting more input, etc., etc., etc. Not entirely effective, nor can that process really capture the really great sparking moments of working together in the same room (the reason, I love collaborative work).
We really want these billboards to not just cap off Save the City, not just describe or some how summarize what we’ve learned, but continue with this conversation that we’ve been having. So, we had some terrible ideas for a long while, but we moved through them, we wrote them all down, then crossed them all out eventually, and it was the process of doing that, of really talking about where we were trying to go without knowing where we were going that was entirely worth it. I think we started the billboard brainstorming around 7:30pm were ready to give up around 9pm and we were there until 11pm still finalizing things. And, they’re still not finalized yet, but they’re close.
And we didn’t just brainstorm, we did the preliminary layout(s) together, we critiqued as we went, and it was so completely worth the exhaustion. Danielle called, thankfully, so we could check our work with someone outside of that room to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious, and then we were done, and we’re very, very excited to see these go up.
I hope the summer allows more opportunities for this — a lot of time spent together doing things, working through problems together, in the same room, until we get somewhere better than where we started.
The artwork goes out Monday, and I think the billboards launch mid-month.
Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
As we gear up for the first event of our Save the City project, Listen to the City, we’re also planning ahead for the February event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. Another Friday night at HQ trying our best to get as much work done as we could before heading out to the opening at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Continue reading “Already Looking Ahead to February’s Save the City Event!”
Meeting twice in a week can make such a difference in terms of how much we can get done. We’re still in the thick of planning for the first event of Save the City. We met earlier last week to go over the basics of finalizing our adjusted budget, put together the first round of promo, and just to sort of regroup after the holidays.
It also really helped to keep us from losing track of where we were, which seemed to be the case when we went a week (or sometimes more) between meetings. Certainly, it’s a bit more intensive, but it gave time and brain space to start talking about some larger ideas (about projects and our practice in general), and really helps to keep multi-tasking things moving.
It might seem like a lot of sitting around and talking and writing, but this is how we get things done!!!
Continue reading “How We Spend Friday Nights: Planning, Writing, and Mapping”
Tuesday felt like the first day back from the holidays should. We were tired, well Josh and I were tired, we were motivated and anxious to get to work, and we got a lot done. It was a very great way to start the new year!
We spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon planning for our upcoming project, Save the City, which will involve a number of community events over the coming months, and the details of which we’ll be announcing soon.
Basically, we’re hoping to start a larger conversation with the City of Windsor, trying to determine all the details that make this place what it is, while also imaging new ways to document it at this moment in time. It’s going to require the participation of as many people as we can get, and it’s going to be the start of something even bigger. Needless to say, we are excited!!!
Continue reading “Phone Calls and Budgets – Tuesday Morning Productivity Extravaganza”
Monday night marked the last Broken City Lab meeting of the year!!! We’ll be taking a brief break over the holidays and then gearing up for a series of events starting at the end of January.
For anyone who has been wondering how to get involved or if we’d ever hold open office hours again, stay tuned, there’s going to be a lot of things to do in the new year!
As per usual, we spent some time just trying to sort out our upcoming schedules, planning for a performance at Propeller Gallery in January, and talking about the many details we need to get started on for the Broken City Lab: Save the City project.
Monday night at BCL HQ, going over plans for moving forward on our recently OAC funded project starting in January 2010, Broken City Lab: Save the City (details to follow), using good ol’ fashioned lists and future technologies—it was amazing, in every sense of the word.
Not sure how many more times we’ll be meeting over the break, but we’re all excited for what the new year has in store … so many projects, it will be excellent!
We spent last night watching a rough cut of some of Eric’s ongoing micro-residency project, did a lot of measuring, used Google Earth, did some math, drew some diagrams, and brainstormed a new project (because Cristina wants to sew, a lot).
With the semester basically over now, we’re hoping to wrap up a couple things before the new year before starting on some bigger new projects in the new year, which you will hear about soon!
Continue reading “Math, Markers, and Measurements + Eric’s micro-documentary”