Posted on

Listen to the City: an Overview

Back in January, we asked nearly 40 people two questions: Why did you first come to Windsor? and Why are you still here? We asked those questions at an event called, Listen to the City, which was the first part of the five-month long project, Save the City. It was an incredible night.

The answers we got over the hour and a half we spent together at Phog Lounge in downtown Windsor presented not just answers to those two questions, but sprawling conversations about what it means to live in Windsor, how we’ve shaped this city, and how it’s shaped us.

The five-minute edit you can listen to below is just a slice of everything that was talked about that night. Initially, we thought we might be able to cut a lengthier audio documentary together, but there were pragmatic implications that kept us from doing that. Hours of audio with conversations that covered more ground than we could have ever imagined meant that it was a lot more difficult to piece something much larger together.

There were many voices that we unfortunately couldn’t include in the edit below, but only because of the amazing conversations those folks had, which in turn didn’t offer the kind of brief samples similar to those that we cut together. We added some music and tried to capture a general direction of conversation that we gathered from gradually listening to all of the conversations (Danielle took on the considerable task of doing just that and creating the assembly edit of this excerpt– hours and hours and hours of work, but we’re so excited to finally be able to share this).

So, while this excerpt in no way does justice to the range of conversations that we had that night, we hope it might be a good introduction, or a good marker in time, of what a group of 40 Windsorites thought about this city at the start of 2010.

Listen to the five-minute excerpt: (updated – thanks to Stephen Surlin for finessing our mix)

[audio:http://www.brokencitylab.org/audio/ListenToTheCity-20100826-SurlinMix.mp3]

Or you can also download the MP3 of Listen to the City.

For good measure, we can also provide the original recordings in their entirety in a zip file if you’re interested. We make no promises about the audibility/legibility of every minute of these recordings, but if you have the time, they’re worth listening to as a whole. However, the zip file is over 700mb and so not easily uploaded to our servers. However, as promised, we will be officially handing over a copy of the five-minute excerpt and the raw audio files to the Windsor Archives soon.

We need to sincerely thank everyone who came out that night and shared with us.

Broken City Lab: Save the City was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Posted on

Mid-August: Maps, Writing & Cardboard

We’ve been quiet on the blog, but not because we haven’t been busy. I’ve been working away at the final touches for the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope, which while taking longer than I had anticipated, was well worth it. The map looks great, we’ll be posting it on here soon and distributing physical copies.

Meanwhile, work continues on our cardboard letters…

Continue reading “Mid-August: Maps, Writing & Cardboard”

Posted on

Maps + Final Cut

I’ll be spending most of the week finishing up a couple lingering parts of Save the City: assembling the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope and putting the final touches on the edit from Listen to the City that Danielle assembled.

The audio documentary is going to be an overview, or maybe like a trailer — it’s about 5 or 6 minutes long and will only sample bits and pieces of conversations from the hours of recorded audio from Listen to the City. However, we’ll be posting the unedited clips for download alongside the trailer as well as submitting the trailer and unedited clips on CD to the Windsor Archives.

As well, some very preliminary test maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. These will actually be 22″ x 17″, but also made available for download. Above are just some sketches, but I showed some of these to Danielle and Cristina — they liked the red map, but I think we’ll go with something like numbered dots to demarcate the sites. Or, potentially, there will be two maps.

Work like this is fun, but a bit of a long road. I suppose I’m being overly cautious to make sure that these are moving in the right direction before committing and doing a complete version, but ultimately, patience now will make it worthwhile not having to redo it later.

Posted on

Cardboard Letters Continued

We were only about half strong this week, but Josh, Rosina and I plowed ahead on the letters, this time focusing on just the front and back faces of the letters K, A, E, T, and I. We figured that since we had the projector set up anyways, it was worth doing as many faces as we could. Filling in cardboard with extrusions later wouldn’t be so hard.

We’ll continue those adventures next week.

Meanwhile, we’re doing some visual research into new sites for projection and trying to figure out how best to turn our Imaginary Platform into something very distributable. More soon.

Posted on

An Imaginary Platform: 2010 Municipal Elections in Windsor

We’ve updated our imaginary campaign post to reflect some recent (positive) changes:

Our projects try to work around the realities that we encounter in Windsor on a daily basis. We address these realities creatively, and so the ways in which we address them don’t always translate to solutions. We usually try to suggest the change we’d like to see, albeit on a small scale. So, in continuing with this work, we offer the following:

We’re little less than 3 months away from the 2010 municipal elections here in Windsor. We’re not sure what to make of all the candidates entirely at this point, though it’s encouraging to see so many people entering the process.

It’s essentially a given that we’ll have the same mayor for a third term (or maybe not?), but we’ll likely see a number of new councillors. This is, in large part, due to the new 10 Ward system along with promises from councillors to not run again.

In hopes of imaging a greater city, we’d like to propose the following platform. It has gaps, it’s biased, it’s potentially unfundable, but it’s a list of ideas that we think could make Windsor a better place to live:

  • Have at least two open-air city council meetings at Charles Clark Square, encourage a large audience, showcase democracy in action.
  • Find a private partner and retrofit the Armouries tomorrow: get the WSO their permanent venue, renovate smaller spaces for artist studios, and keep larger rooms for small theatre performances.
  • Sort out the Capitol Theatre appropriately. Clear the way to make it easier for WIFF to do more screenings, for Artcite to stay put (if they want to), for community theatre groups to do more performances, and to give Media City a consistent and reliable venue.
  • Partner with the University to put a large multi-department Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences building in that parking lot across from the AGW and the downtown bus depot.
  • Raise the cost of keeping buildings vacant. Do this immediately.
  • Encourage small businesses to locate downtown by offering free-rent for the first 6 months they’re in business. It didn’t take long — some folks picked up on that idea. Offer rent at 50% for the following 6 months if the business hires to 2 of more employees in the first 6 months.
  • Connect Transit Windsor with Tecumseh and the county with express buses, and do a better job at integrating with Detroit, get aggressive with promoting the use of public transit for everyday commutes.
  • Commit to planting more trees on those barren stretches of sidewalks. Who wants to walk next to 4 lanes of traffic in the baking sun?
  • Get bikes lanes in that make sense, ask the everyday riders where they go and how they like to get there, cross-reference that information with new public transit plans to make it easy to bike short commutes and dead simple to connect to the transit system for longer ones.
  • Initiate an aggressive campaign to retain talent that graduates from the University and St. Clair. It’s unacceptable to sit idly by as our best and brightest move to bigger cities. Short-term subsidies to start a business fresh out of school, 6 months of free studio / rehearsal space for artists, musicians, and performers. Tell the world that we are doing this.
  • Empower and fund people at the city like Jim Yanchula to act on their ideas.
  • Give the Cultural Affairs Office the resources to do good things and help that office to understand the needs of the arts and cultural community.
  • Commit to acting on Community Improvement Plans with an actionable to-do list over the 4-year term.
  • Create an international competition to design gateways for our city (at the border and from the 401 at the least), then make sure there’s money to actually build these gateways. Advertisements should not be allowed.
  • Start an innovation prize by partnering with Essex County and appropriate Economic Development entities to solve large problems and reward real innovation happening here.
  • Convert 30% of riverfront and other key city-owned spaces to naturalized areas.
  • Make the deep and rich histories of this region a part of everyday life — provide artists, community leaders, local historians, and elders resources to demarcate small and large historical occurrences.
  • Own and embrace that we are an international city with an unbelievable wealth of multi-cultural communities.

If you’re running for council, please steal these ideas.

Posted on

A New Project Begins: Cardboard, a projector, and lots of editing

In what feels like the first time in months, we got together and worked on making something (that is, as opposed to planning something). We’re getting started on what is going to be an epic project, time-wise. We’re making a bunch of large 3D cardboard letters.

Collaborative Apartment Studio is very fun.

Continue reading “A New Project Begins: Cardboard, a projector, and lots of editing”

Posted on

Keeping Track of the Archives

Here it is, or at least, here’s part of the physical archive, the scannable stuff anyways, from 2008-2009. It’s been hanging out in my filing cabinet for a long time, but finally with the help of Miranda Fay during her off-hours, it’s been gradually scanned in page by page.

Archives are crucial for taking stock, for remembering, for understanding a history. Given the pace with which we work, it’s rare to find the time to actually reflect on what we’ve done. Usually, this happens, in a way, when compiling images for an artist talk or presentation, but inevitably, even that process is limited by what was created by a digital source already.

331 scans from about a year and a half of work, early stencils, poster designs, and lots of hand-written notes. I can’t wait to find the time to look at all of it. And now Miranda has started on the 2010 archive. It’s so awesome to know that there’s now another copy (even if it just a digital scan) of these things.

We seem to always talk about compiling this archive into something legible, now that it’s digital, maybe we’ll be that much more convinced to attempt that process … but I doubt it. The fallout from Save the City and SRSI alone are still on our plates, to go even further back than that seems daunting to say the least.

Meanwhile, we’re planning to meet Wednesday night, and I’m really looking forward to this. It will be one of the first times that we’ll have all been together for a while and not have to talk about some aspect of admin-type stuff. Though inevitably, that will be in the mix too. Above, I’m thinking on a post-it note.

Posted on

Getting Reacquainted with the Neighbourhood

I took a leisurely bike ride around the neighbourhood yesterday afternoon. It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to explore, to spend time paying attention to things. I basically wanted an update on the neighbourhood that Danielle and I had lived in a couple years ago.

The eastern edge of Sandwich is quieter than ever. Four blocks of houses (well at least one side of the street for four blocks) is boarded up, it’s beginning to feel like it will be a very long time before that situation is sorted out between the city and the bridge company.

In the meantime, the vacancies and the strange empty spaces created by that situation are increasingly curious. Those stairs need to be used in some kind of project.

Continue reading “Getting Reacquainted with the Neighbourhood”

Posted on

Keeping Busy

It might seem a bit quiet around here as of late, but rest assured we’re keeping busy. We’re in the thick of paperwork — grant reports, project proposals, etc. However, we’re also quickly approaching the start of a new project that you’ll see unfold here likely over the next month or two.

Danielle is working away on the audio documentary from Listen to the City, and Michelle and Rosina cleaned up our workspace at the Ecohouse and decorated (as you can see above) by putting up some of the remaining parts of Lea Bucknell‘s installation as part of SRSI (which if I remember correctly was put together by Thea Jones).

In the meantime, you can check out the interview Michelle and I did with Amy Miller on the Craig Fahle Show on Detroit’s NPR affiliate, WDET 101.9fm on Thursday. If you’re in Windsor/Detroit and not listening to this show on a regular basis, you’re really missing out. Below is an edited version of the show with just our interview, but here’s the link to check out the entire episode.

[audio:CFS_7-22-BCL-edit.mp3]
Posted on

How to Briefly Describe Amazing Things: A Recap of 30 Days of SRSI

We’ve been really lucky.

For a couple of years now, we’ve been able to do the work that we’ve wanted to do, make the kinds of changes that we want to see, and create a set of projects that have kept us interested in staying in Windsor.

The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation wrapped up a couple weeks ago. For 30 days, we hosted 25 amazing artists and artist collectives, all of whom worked in downtown Windsor and generated a huge number of new ideas, initiatives, and relationships.

For 30 days, we were very, very lucky.

From June 11th to July 11th, we saw projects that redefined the idea of what BIAs could do, generated new models for micro-economies by exchanging food for stories, unravelled and reassembled long lost sweaters, and introduced an unprecedented level of investigation into the personal histories found in homes (and gardens) across the city.

Projects that openly played with urban infrastructures, investigated the potential for utilizing the postal service for remembering forgotten places, and made many, many, many kinds of maps will all have a lasting impact on the people who were lucky enough to encounter them.

Workshops for children and adults made real and impacting use of open spaces, stories around our border realities were eagerly shared, and many delicious pies, meals and snacks were collaboratively prepared and enjoyed over insightful conversations using fresh and local ingredients.

Installations lit up and animated storefronts, interrupted the social experience of public spaces, and imagined the collapse of municipalities generated a new way to look at materials and architecture.

Performative works demonstrated DIY surveillance methodologies, actively spent time in marginalized spaces, infused the local economy with gambling earnings from the casino, and generated a factory from social media technologies.

All of these things happened here in Windsor in just 30 days.

SRSI created a concentrated series of activities that demonstrated the potential in rethinking how we attribute value to space, changed how we might think about creative activity impacting a community, and looked at the possibility to forget about a set of economic development strategies that haven’t worked for quite some time.

The things that we’ve felt about Windsor — its potential, its frustrations, and the novel possibility for generating creative work that can only happen here — were all reinforced through this residency project. We have to admit that we’ll probably do it again, in some fashion, because we believe that the projects we saw unfold are only the beginning of the incredible things that can happen in this city.

We want to thank everyone who participated in this project — without you, this would not have been possible. Your work made an impact on us, and we might argue, the entire city. Thank you.

This project was generously supported by the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, Arts Council Windsor & Region, Windsor Pride, and the Ontario Arts Council.