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How to Forget the Border Completely, submitted for print!

Months of work and research culminated in a 3am submission to Blurb to print our How to Forget the Border Completely publication. It’s about 150 pages long. I’m really happy with this, and I can’t wait to get it back in print. Above, a screenshot of some of the pages in the PDF.

In terms of distributing the content, it’s now really difficult to imagine parting it from this kind of collected format. We’ll offer the book for sale through Blurb, but maybe a PDF as well? Hard to say, it’s 70mb, a bit of an unruly download I suppose. The version I ordered was excessively expensive, but it seemed only fitting to get at least a few copies with a nice image wrap, matte pages, and no Blurb logo.

Anyways, huge thanks to my BCL colleagues and the always generous Lee Rodney and Tom Provost for working with us on this. On a side note, the more I work with InDesign, the more I love it.

It’s election day in Ontario, you should vote.

How to Forget the Border Completely is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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ATTC Calgary: Unfolding the Cycles of a City on Billboards & in Print

On the final day of our ATTC Calgary residency, the billboards launched. We headed out in the early afternoon with Randy to document them all.

Alongside highways, on the sides of buildings in the downtown core, and mixed in with other urban-fringe architecture. The billboards stood deeply embedded and clearly removed from the landscape, at times being rotated amongst advertisements, and in other instances, acting more directly as annotations to the site of installation.

As a final trajectory of ATTC Calgary, these billboards were installed around the city noting a series of cyclical narratives. Using the phrasing, “…and then the city…” each billboard features a different statement that referenced an overarching narrative or perhaps a brief moment in time about the city, read either internally or externally. These billboards are aimed at creating a space for a momentary discussion around the possibilities in narratives themselves, which is centred on one’s personal connection, history, and knowledge on the city.

In total, TRUCK had secured us seven billboard locations spread throughout Calgary, concentrated in the downtown core and in the city’s industrial edge.

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Re: Collaborating on a big publication, Dropbox ftw

We met yesterday, but too much going on for any photos.

I figure that our shared Dropbox folder says most of the important stuff anyways.

We’re working towards completing our HFBC publication, which includes things like:

  • posters of inventions on crossing an imagined border wall
  • maps and 3D renderings of a cross-border portal system
  • a Canada Border Services consultancy
  • a tunnel token micro-grant
  • proposed public art projects that bring a level of symmetry to Windsor and Detroit
  • sketches of 1000 pedestrian crossings
  • transcriptions from interviews with frequent border crossers
  • new geographies
  • small-scale messaging options across international borders
  • technological imaginings for helping people otherwise unable to experience crossing a border
  • scavenger hunts / geocaching projects
  • renderings of border impediments that don’t exist, but might as well exist
  • some writing to help frame all of this

Excited to continue. Looks like next Wednesday / Friday evening are open…

How to Forget the Border Completely is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

 

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Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell

Meeting outside is the greatest. There’s talk of building some kind of mobile table / bistro to make this possible in other locations, but I suppose that’s further down on the to-do list.

For now, we’re immersed in bringing together research and inventions around our How to Forget the Border Completely project to pull into a publication.

Above, we brought lots of reference material on Friday night.

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BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)

We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices.

Back at the Ecohouse to try to get the plan together to work on a video we’ve been tossing around for a while — final decisions have been elusive, so we put it on hold for now. Instead, we headed out to the front lawn and reminded ourselves of the what we can do with How to Forget the Border Completely.

Executing these projects is just a matter of carving out a day … we spend time planning, testing, experimenting, brainstorming because we know we’re more curious together and our collective curiosity is the driver for every one of these projects. It’s not about the solutions, it’s about the questions.

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New City Reader And The Return Of Print Media

“Read All About It“, “Hot Off The Presses“, these are not the stereotypical calls of a long-gone era of children calling on street corners, they are headlines about the recent rise in popularity of print media.

In an article by Alissa Walker for Good.is, entitled There’s a Newspaper Being Made, Right Now, in a Museum, she discusses the publication that’s creating this particular buzz — New City Reader, which is also a part of the exhibit The Last Newspaper, held at the New Museum.

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Public 41: Gardens

Sorry — it’s late, this documentation is rushed, but I just received a few copies of Public, issue 41, Gardens, edited by Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon, which features our Removable Garden project on the cover, and as a nice spread inside!

We wrote the text, which outlines some of process and ideas behind the research developing the magnetic planters, as well as some discussion around what led to wanting to develop the project in the first place.

Anyways, it’s beyond exciting to see our project in print… you should pick up a copy. There’s a huge number of great articles and discussions on the creative, resistive, and productive uses of artist and activist gardens, including selections from Adrian Blackwell and Oliver Kellhammer … highly recommended. And, while you’re at it, you could pick up a copy of Public 40, which features an article written by Dr. Michael Darroch and Kim Nelson (colleagues at the University of Windsor) on Windsor (including BCL and Green Corridor).