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Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope

The details: Sunday, February 28, 2010 (1pm) at 362 California Ave, Windsor

As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, and to better understand the city and its rich and failed history, Broken City Lab researchers will host an open community event on Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 1pm to map and invent two distinct community tours—Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope.

Throughout the first part of the event, Broken City Lab will lead community participants in brainstorming the numerous sites deemed to be worthy of apology—these could include failed strip malls, roads without sidewalks, or former auto factories—along with the numerous sites that give community participants hope for the city—these could include an especially great bike trail, sites of architectural significance, or places that can be imagined as being easily improved.

Immediately following the creation of these lists, Broken City Lab will set out to demarcate and officially designate each Site of Apology and Site of Hope. At each site, a short ceremony will be held and community members are welcomed to come along to help recognize each and every site.

A map demarcating each of the designated Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope will be made available online to encourage the ongoing investigation of these sites by community members.

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

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Sometimes Planning Means Drawing

While we’re still moving along on our Save the City project in the background, we’re also continuing to look ahead to other projects and deadlines coming up. Tuesday mornings are always a really good productive time, and this week was no exception.

While we wait for our ribbons and postcards to arrive for the upcoming Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event, we’re looking into CAFKA and the ANTI 2010 festival, both of which could be a lot of fun and give us a chance to go and play in other cities.

Continue reading “Sometimes Planning Means Drawing”

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New LCDs and Serial Ports and some Max/MSP for good measure

I haven’t posted on this project for a little while, partially because of the preparation for the ongoing Save the City project, and partially because the little time that I’ve had to work on this has only resulted in small increments. So, I figured I would wait until I had some more significant updates to make to post, and here they are.

Basically, I’ve been working on a couple parts of the project. I’ve been updating a Max/MSP/Jitter project that BCL had previously used for our projection performances to try to automate some of the scaling of text depending on what the input is, while also continuing with the Arduino and LCD integration.

Continue reading “New LCDs and Serial Ports and some Max/MSP for good measure”

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Listen to the City: Discovering the Histories of Windsor through Conversation

Sunday night was the first event of our Save the City project: Listen to the City, and it was incredible!!! We had an amazingly generous crowd of old friends and new faces come out to share their stories of Windsor with us and we recorded close to 8 hours of their hopes, concerns, and personal histories of the city.

We’ll be going through all of this material over the next little while to turn it into an audio documentary that we’ll distribute online, hopefully on some local airwaves, and also through a contribution of the final work to the Windsor Archives. We’re hoping that this documentary will serve as a marker in time that will have captured a very specific kind of conversation happening right now, and maybe happening for the first time. It’s going to be something very special.

We want to thank everyone who came out and participated — this literally could not have been possible without you! There’s a number of photos and some overview of the discussions after the jump of what was our absolute most favourite night of the year so far.

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Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm

Thursday night Cristina and I were up in Toronto at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, participating in the Christopher Hume curated exhibition, Public Realm.

We did a series of projections with short texts / fill-in-the-blanks that dealt with issues of public and private space, which were generated from the answers to the questionnaires we created, responses on Twitter, and conversations amongst ourselves.

Public Realm is up until January 31st, and there’s documentation of the projections up in the gallery along with a growing collection of our questionnaires with a ton of great answers. If you’re in the neighbourhood, stop by, there’s a lot of great work in the show!!!

After the jump, there’s a photo from all 100 fill-in-the-blanks that we projected.

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Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events

Tuesday was all about research. We looked up some more details on ribbons and talked more about how we would move forward with the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event.

We’re also getting ready for Sunday’s event, Listen to the City (remember, 8pm at Phog), and for Thursday night’s projection performance at Propeller in Toronto.

Continue reading “Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events”

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Public Realm Questionnaire

We’re participating in an upcoming exhibition entitled, Public Realm, at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto. For the exhibition we’re going to be doing some outdoor projection around the gallery, and we want to have your input!

We want to know what you think about the public realm, and about public and private space, and about what you can do in that space and maybe even, why you’d want to bother doing something in that space in the first place.

To participate, you can do one of two things …

Download this fillable PDF, fill it in and email it back to us, or fill in this form below:

[form 2 “Public Realm”]

We’re going to project all of the submissions we get on Thursday, January 21st, as part of the opening for the exhibition!

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Public Realm at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts

On Thursday, January 21st at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto, we’ll be doing a projection performance that examines the language and ideas surrounding public space, intervention, urban surfaces, and city infrastructures. As part of Propeller’s Public Realm exhibition, we will curate a text-based list of ideas, statements, and questions, that address the concerns embedded in our practice and that appear to be at the heart of the exhibition itself.

We will ask for the participation of those in attendance, along with other momentary collaborators through tools such as Twitter and SMS, for submissions during the duration of the performance. The projection itself will consist of white text and will be projected onto the façade of a nearby building. Photographic documentation of the projection will be installed in the gallery space afterwards.

Public Realm opens on January 20th and runs to January 31st, 2010.

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Quick Update: LEDs Survived, Postcards are Being Distributed!

Just a quick update…the LEDs in the freezer are still going strong, more than two days later, which is good news for any potential LED-embedded ice or snow project. The glow was way more exciting than this photo makes it appear, as I had assumed the battery wouldn’t have lasted this long at all.

Finally had the chance to pick up some more postcards, and yet continually finding myself not having them when I’m actually talking to people. Cristina picked up a bunch to distribute downtown, Josh went to Walkerville, Michelle went through campus, I’ve mostly been doing hand-offs.

Here’s the remaining pile — 250 goes pretty fast, but we need to get rid of them all by the 24th! We’re excited, hope you already have the date in your calendar!