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Later Nights, since it’s summer now

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.

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A Toolkit for Saving a City

Though we have a lot more to say about Save the City than I’ll attempt right now, you should know that we put together a toolkit that describes the processes we figured out throughout the last five months. We put together a nice one-page fold up list of instructions, so to speak, for how one might take on similar tactics in (re)discovering their city, neighbourhood, block, or apartment building.

Cristina wrote about the process a while back, and the toolkits turned out really, really, really well. Soon, we’ll be posting a downloadable PDF.

The event last Friday was awesome. We had a really good turn out, we got to talk about and see (really for the first time) everything we’ve been doing so far this year all lined up together. Have we come to any conclusions? I’m not sure, but I know that we’ve begun to articulate some of the questions we’ve had for a long time, a little bit better.

We’re hoping to put together a book by the end of the summer about all of this (and by all of this, I mean Save the City). We need to devote some time to really digging into discussing what the project has been and how it unfolded. In the meantime, we still have some billboard space to fill, expect to see some photos of those in the coming weeks. As well, we still need to put together a map for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. So, lots to do, and all while we prepare for the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation!!!

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

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Making Sense of Big Group Calendars

This is the third calendar iteration for SRSI. We’re getting close to having things finalized, which means we’ll be announcing the whole list of artists, activities, and events very soon.

Michelle put this particular calendar together after the whole crew assembled a working calendar last week.

We’re also anticipating on making a long, timeline(d) calendar for display, but that’s sort of low on the priority list.

Danielle and I were on a panel with InCUBATE last week as part of Open Engagement, where they spoke about their radical arts admin practice. Making calendars, planning schedules, revising budgets, and organizing so many people / spaces / ideas certainly makes me wonder about what we’re doing now that could actually help inform other projects. How do we keep track of the tactics we’re using to pull off SRSI that could be discussed alongside our other projects? Or is this just part of the process of pulling together another project?

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XBees, Arduinos, Serial Data

I made some huge progress over the last week or so on this ongoing Arduino / LCD project — it’s finally gone wireless!

With some more silly mistakes behind me, I’m finally getting a better handle on how to break down the problems I run into and solve them a lot faster. I remember back in February, it seemed as though it was going to be impossible to actually get this wireless part happening, so I’m super relieved to know it’s at least partly working.

Also, there have been people asking for the code used in this project (in terms of PHP and Arduino scripts), I will upload them! I just haven’t had the time to go through and appropriately clean them up and comment them, so I’m not sure how useful they would be at this point. I just wanted to note that I will indeed be doing that soon though!

Lots of photos of wireless glory ahead…

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Getting things done!

The Eco-House was bumpin’ Friday night!  Amongst a slew of other undergoing projects, Michelle, Rosina, Josh and I we’re all hard at work, trying to get everything organized for our upcoming event and final installment of Save The City that’s taking place this Friday at the Art Gallery of Windsor!

Rosina and I tackled the Save The City Micro Tool-Kits that will also be distributed THIS Friday night.  We did everything from editing the recipes, to creating a layout, to drawing little doodles, and we’re very excited to share them with you!  While Rosina and I were busy working away on one end of the table, Josh and Michelle were just as busy on the other end organizing and creating a calendar and list of needs for all the SRSI participants.

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Things Worth Saving Recap

Though we’ve received a few of the postcards back because of a faulty address, for the most part, the 150 postcards sent out for Things Worth Saving, as part of our ongoing Save the City project, have likely now arrived to their destinations.

I must admit that when I first laid eyes on the stacks upon stacks of  postcards that we were fill and mail out that evening I yearned for my San Pellegrino to immaculately transform into Kentucky bourbon. Alas it did not, but thankfully that seemingly desperate moment revealed itself as fleeting as the lovely people who attended the event feverishly jot down their various anecdotes, love stories, musings and mini manifestos regarding Windsor. The writing was non stop – the sounds of the building and camera snaps were overpowered by the sounds of pencils, pens and markers scribbling effervescently.

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Open Engagement, Group Work: The Collective Impetus

Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?”

We’ll be speaking on the panel, Group Work: The Collective Impetus, along with folks from National Bitter Melon Council, InCUBATE, and students from OTIS’s Public Practice program.

This trip is going to incredible for a few reasons (including getting to see the city of Portland, in all of it’s functionality), but perhaps more importantly, we’re going to be able to speak to a lot of people who are engaged in a practice that is at least slightly aligned to what we do here in BCL. It’s more often the case that we go to a conference as some of the only artists in attendance (an interesting position to be in, but always a little lonely).

There’s so many conversations we want to have, the 3 days we’re actually there likely won’t be enough.

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Expect More Activity + How Do You Collaborate Online?

Be it resolved that we’ll be a lot more active on here starting now.

We’ve been overly involved in communicating on Google Wave while trying to keep our brains together for Save the City. With that project winding down, we’ll be shifting more of our research and communications back on here. We’ve missed it.

And Josh said it best when he suggested that we should’ve been using the blog instead of Google Wave the entire time. He’s completely right.

Using that fancy collaborative tool that Google seemed to suggest would be the future of email never really fit into our work flow all that well, but it seemed the most convenient for having notes and research in one place. At first, maybe kidding ourselves, we thought it would do away with multiple emails back and forth, but then we kept forgetting to check our waves, so then we opted-in to receive emails when a Wave had been updated, and so it became really no better than a bunch of emails and some Google documents.

We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. We seem to lose so much in translation from discussions to the next time we meet up or begin working on something new. Should we be saving Word documents to Dropbox? I know Cristina and I have been using it to pass photos back and forth and its fairly convenient, though we haven’t tried working on the documents from there — I suppose we’re using it as a glorified FTP. Google Docs kind of works, but is somewhat annoying to have documents in two places (as I don’t think anyone is really truly committing to the cloud yet). What do you use when you’re working on something with someone else? How do you resolve multiple files with the same names?

With our goal (really this time) of trying to put together some kind of publication soon(ish), what’s going to be the best way to keep ourselves on the same page, or at the very least, merge everything together at the very end?

Any regular readers — what’s your method(s) for collaborating online? BCL, any suggestions for how we should move forward with this?

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How to Save a City

The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor.

For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events in the Broken City Lab: Save the City series, or perhaps you’ve just read about it here, or maybe you’ve meant to come, but you haven’t been able to fit it into your schedule — in an case, this is going to be our final event as part of the project, and you should come.

The things that we’ve learned from working with the community on creating audio documentaries, city-wide maps, sidewalk-parades, and postcards with hand-written letters have changed the way we think about this city, its past, and its future.

So, we would like to cordially invite you to the final part of Save the City on May 21st at the Art Gallery of Windsor. We’ll be in or around the building depending on the weather, but either way, we promise we won’t be hard to find. We would like you to come out to share with us one more time some of the things that shape the way you think about Windsor — we’ll talk about what we’ve learned, we’ll ask you a bunch of questions, we’ll show you hundreds of photographs, and then we’ll ask you to help us come up with a message that we’ll then put up on a billboard (or two) somewhere in Windsor. We’re hoping that this message can say something to the city that needs to be said.

Hope you can make it.

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

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XBees + Arduino

Although it’s been a while since I last worked on this project, things are continuing to move along. I finally assembled the Ladyada XBee adapters and successfully passed a message between the two XBees.

So, I’m not the best solderer and the first adapter I worked on suffered from an overusing tip on my soldering iron, which made heating up the solder with the tip of the iron next to impossible. There were also some issues (that remain unresolved) in terms of configuring the XBees, but thankfully that step seems to be unnecessary (at this point anyways).

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