Exploring Philadelphia & Public Talk with Mural Arts & Philly Works

We’ll  be visiting Philadelphia to explore the development of short- and long-term projects in collaboration with the Mural Arts Program and community organizations in the city. During our visit, Mural Arts and Philly Works will be hosting a public presentation of our work, and a stimulating conversation about how artists can engage people in conversations and collaborative actions that build stronger awareness of, connection to and investment in our community fabric.

The details, if you’re in the area:

Monday, November 19, 6 p.m.
City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
Lincoln Financial Mural Arts Center
at the Thomas Eakins House
1727-1729 Mt. Vernon Street

Presented in collaboration with Philly Works.

More Laser Cuts ordered

We’ve played with Ponoko before, laser cutting some acrylic for a mould, and the results were great. We’re now sending off another couple of files for an upcoming project.

We’ll be cutting on mirrored acrylic .. and

… aluminum.

Ordered and locked! Should arrived in a few weeks.

 

Calendars, Notes, Installations, Vinyl, Camouflage, Drywall, Tests, and Hearts

Our rate of posting on here has slowed down considerably since the summer. We’re still busy, it’s just the pace of the work and projects now seems to span longer and longer time frames, and with so many ongoing and overlapping projects, it’s just a lot more challenging to find the time to keep track of it all. We’re actually putting in more time than ever, with Hiba and I meeting regularly two to three days a week and our colleagues joining in when schedules allow. It’s amazingly fun and productive, but harder than ever to document meaningfully.

So, just for a quick look into the last four or five weeks, here’s what we’ve been up to…

Above, we’re planning for the 1W3KND Writing Residency, and we’ll be announcing our participating writers and artists really soon.

We’ve also been hosting biweekly events at CIVIC SPACE. Every other Monday is All Tomorrow’s Problems. We take a lot of notes.

Every other Wednesdays are Zine Nights, and then there’s Skills For Good(s) on a semi-regular Tuesday night schedule. All of these events are free and open to everyone. We usually post the details on the right-hand side column of the front page of our website, and also try to keep civicspace.info up to date. Emphasis on try.

Here are some of the leftovers from Alana Bartol’s recent Skills for Good(s) on Making a Ghillie Suit!

October also allowed us to play host to Sam Lefort returning to take on a project with students from Forster.

The project and exhibition were so great and it was incredibly fun to have Sam back for an entire month.

Here’s just a little peek at her installation.

And, the process of taking down the vinyl to make way for the upcoming Cross-Plotting, opening on Friday, November 9th!

Hiba and I have been working on some other parallel projects for an exhibition in January. Think planes and banners.

Rosina provided the new over-sized pad of paper. It’s been very helpful.

We also still have some postcards left from Sam’s show, if you’d like some.

We’ve been patching the walls, a lot. I think the winter break is going to be set aside for a painting party.

We’ve also had the pleasure of Laura Gentili as a kick-ass studio assistant. She’s assembled furniture, changed door locks, organized, scanned, and sketched her way through the last few weeks, and been awesome the entire way.

Sam was kind enough to leave our space a little nicer than she found it. Above, and installation to brighten up the back office area at CIVIC SPACE.

Also, we’re still working on our window installation, with the help of Paul Anderson. Earlier today, he was testing a contact mic, while also going over details to build the Max patch we’ll actually need.

And this afternoon, Hiba and I also picked up a project that appeared in How to Forget the Border Completely.

This is something that Danielle has been wanting to do forever. Above, a really early prototype.

We’ll eventually laser cut and etch these from aluminum. Installation to follow. Also, in the background, we’re writing. We’re still working on the Homework publication with Brennan and Cholé. And, we’re planning projects into the fall of 2013. It’s good.

Interactive Window Installation, progressing beyond the Max/MSP solution

After our post a few weeks ago about a new interactive window installation, we had some interesting and helpful suggestions, but one email in particular stood out.

Paul Anderson wrote to us briefly with an offer to help and after a quick introduction of his incredible depth of knowledge of all things electronic shortly thereafter, he showed up yesterday with the sensor pictured above. Basically, it’s used for industrial automation and I can’t recall the name of it, but see that red light, that’s the important part.

Pictured above, Paul is holding up this device to the window on the inside of CIVIC SPACE and our artist-in-residence, Sam Lefort, places her hand on the window from outside, and that little light turns from green to red. I can’t recall exactly what it’s detecting (I’m hoping Paul can fill in some blanks in the comments), but essentially by dialing in the right sensitivity, you can get this thing to act as a trigger when someone’s hand is in front of it through the window. This gets us past trying to use computer vision in Max to detect the presence of a hand, which would have run into some challenges dealing with the range of lighting conditions we deal with at the window (pictured below).

Still assuming that  we’ll use Max to record the audio (as Stephen had suggested in the comments) and add some other useful automation like date/time, possibly some early EQ or amplification, and maybe even setting this thing up so it will tweet us when it’s recording and automatically upload it to our servers, or maybe something else entirely.

Anyways, I’m confident in saying that I’ve never been so excited to see a little red light turn on.

Last Week & Tonight: All Tomorrow’s Problems

Last Monday night,  a small group of us gathered around the table to talk about All Tomorrow’s Problems. This is an open event that invites anyone to attend and think of this as a very loosely organized group to discuss and exercise your ideas on a specific topic. We may not actually make anything, but we will aim to creatively respond to the issue at hand. It picks up again tonight, Monday, October 15 at 7pm!

Huge thanks to Sam Lefort, Eric Boucher and Dan McCafferty for joining me and Danielle. The goal of this biweekly design night is to articulate and imagine the problems and solutions facing the city in a longer horizon, and which have already begun to reveal themselves.

The topic of the first-week: youth retention. It’s not a secret that this has been an area of ongoing concern for me, personally, and so it was great to talk through ideas of how we could address this problem, without them being tethered to the all-too-familiar limits and and realities regularly articulated in the community.

Some of the notes from the evening … I particularly liked the idea of making it easier for people to find their place in the community here, rather than assuming their place is waiting for them somewhere else. The big question framing the entire discussion — what are the barriers in place that prevent recent graduates from staying here?

Also discussed — more focus on mentorship, a guerilla marketing campaign for parents to “talk to their kids about Windsor,” a head-hunter for every single graduate, an effort to more coherently articulate the local, and a completely revamped set of bylaws to jumpstart entrepreneurship here that doesn’t look like entrepreneurship in other cities and places.

All Tomorrow’s Problems isn’t aiming to necessarily solve the problems we discuss, but instead, open up an imaginative dialogue around these issues. Solving problems is over-rated anyways, asking the right questions is so much more important. Around the table on the first night, we had artists, designers, filmmakers, teachers, and a soon-to-be lawyer. In my mind, that’s a dangerously good combination of people asking a variety of questions. But, I’m also pretty sure that having you around the table would make it even better.

We’re not dismissing or avoiding actionable ideas, we just don’t want to get caught up in the limits of logistics and pragmatism — the city already seems to do that really well. See you tonight at 7pm.

Help Wanted: Ad-hoc volunteer studio assistant

We’re looking for an ad-hoc volunteer studio assistant to help us do some or all of the following:

-Visual and archival research
-Building and making things
-Silk screening
-Scanning and archiving
-Basic print and/or web design
-Materials research
-General office assistance
-Installation assistance

In return for your one or two day a week time commitment, we offer the following:

-Fun and free coffee
-Experience in a professional artist-run-centre and collective
-An eclectic mix of background music including jazz, hip hop, and metalcore
-Dangerously good reference letters
-Invaluable learning opportunities that will help you make more art, be an incredibly good organizer, and maybe even get you into grad school

Preferred Qualifications:

-High school diploma, first-year University/College, or otherwise very mature
-Incredibly punctual
-Drivers license and access to a vehicle
-General care and attention to detail
-Very positive and helpful attitude
-Focused
-Self-directed
-Well organized
-Experience with power tools and/or Adobe Creative Suite

Start Date: As soon as possible
End Date: End of April 2013 (with possible contract renewal)

Interested? Please fill out the form below, ASAP!


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All Tomorrow’s Problems: the Biweekly Design Night for Future-Focused People

Starting on October 1st at 7pm, we’ll be running biweekly Design Nights focused on creative problem solving All Tomorrow’s Problems. Namely, we’re going to kick things off looking at the issues of youth retention in the city and gradually move on to other future-focused issues.

BCL’s Research Director, Justin, and a rotating co-host will guide the 2-hour studio, which will involve walks, discussions, rapid prototyping and wrap up with an exhibition in December.

Everyone is welcome, though space is limited. Please note that you should bring the following:

  • sketchbook, camera, laptop, drawing tools
  • an open mind and willingness to have productive conversations
  • an appreciation that this isn’t about problem-solving so much as an exercise in utopian-minded praxis

The dates to mark in your calendars:

  • Mondays in October: 1st, 15th, 29th at 7pm-9pm
  • Mondays in November: 12th, 26th at 7pm-9pm
  • Mondays in December: 10th at 7pm-9pm

And, to close, some quick answers to questions that may arise:

You know that the name of this is really similar to All Tomorrow’s Parties, right?

Yes, absolutely. We appreciate the tone of that event and thought it was a nice way to reference doing things at a different scale.

Do I have to be prepared to make art or design anything?

Think of this as a very loosely organized place to discuss and exercise your ideas on a specific topic. We may not actually make anything, but we will aim to creatively respond to the issue at hand.

Do I have to commit to attending every design night?

We hope that you’ll be able to attend as many of these nights as possible, but we understand schedules change. Come when you can. We’ll be trying to accommodate as many people as we can.

Any Max Experts out there? Slow steps towards a new interactive project

Don’t mind the mess. A lot of the stuff on there is really just old ideas still scattered. These are early stages in using Max to try to figure out how to trigger some audio recording with some basic video tracking, and we’re not sure exactly how best to move forward.

This is a new project we’ve been trying to get off the ground for the window at CIVIC SPACE, but it’s slow going. Essentially, we want to use the window as a big microphone area where passersby can answer questions we ask on the future of Windsor. The questions will appear in vinyl in the window itself, but we want the interface to be buttonless. Basically, when you put your hand on the window in a designated area, it will start recording your answer and keep recording for as long as you keep your hand there. Technically, that mic will be located somewhere below the window and facing up. Sound tests so far have proven that sound quality to be very useable. While we originally wanted to try to work with contact mics to keep all the gear inside and away from the weather, the process of trying to test that has been too arduous. Instead, we’ve found a workable solution to store the small web cam and mic outdoors (yet covered) with a workable stable location looking up to the passerby, but we’re still working away to solve a couple of problems:

1. We need to test more to find the right thing to track to trigger the video. Because the installation would be up around the clock, we need to find the right place on the window and possibly an augmented lighting situation so that the cv.jit.moments object can keep track of what it’s looking for with more acuracy. So far, we can dial in the right numbers for a daylight and nighttime situation, but nothing that can do both — mostly because of the glare on the window during the day.

2. We still have to write the audio recording section. I’ve put together the basic skeleton in another patch, but essentially, we need that big black toggle box with the green X in it to automatically start a recording and then turn off again when it toggles off. That recording would be automatically saved to disk with the current date/time.

Would be happy to hear how you’d solve the problem below in the comments. We had wanted to have this up and running this month, but we’re already halfway through, so unless we can solve this soon, we might push it back to December.

1W3KND: Call for Submissions for a New Writing Residency

We want to invite you to participate in our new residency program, 1W3KND aimed at developing essays, interviews, manifestos, critiques, reviews, and other texts around ideas of collaboration, socially engaged works, artist-run culture, and public practices. We’re hoping to publish these in one form or another some time next year.

There have been a number of books released over the past year discussing socially-engaged practices (here’s a list of a few of our favourites), but we’re really interested in reading more from artists themselves, especially those in the earlier stages of their career. We think there’s a need to make more time to write through the ideas, questions, and concerns that come through engaging in these kinds of practices, and we’re hoping we can help to accommodate those interested in doing that writing.

As part of this project, and in the spirit of fostering more collaboration, we’ll also try to pair you with another applicant. If you already have someone who you’d like to come with though, please just make a note of it in the form below.

We can’t offer a fee, but we can offer to cover your travel up to $250, and a place to stay at CIVIC SPACE for a weekend.

Please fill out the form below. The first deadline to apply is September 24th, 2012 as we’d like to start hosting these residencies in November.

Good luck!


Submissions are now closed. We’ll announce the first-round of selected participants soon.

New Exhibition: AS OF 2012 WE ARE ALIVE & WELL: FOUR YEARS IN WINDSOR & BEYOND

FRIDAY, SEPT.14th, 2012 @ WAHC 7:30PM -10PM
OPENING RECEPTION: BROKEN CITY LAB
AS OF 2012 WE ARE ALIVE & WELL: FOUR YEARS IN WINDSOR & BEYOND

WAHC’s year- long exploration of growing up in working class cities or families concludes with the first ever career survey of art and urban research collective Broken City Lab.

Recently long listed for the Sobey Art Award, Broken City Lab’s four years of community engaged interventions across Canada have garnered critical praise, invigorated communities and raised fundamental questions regarding people’s relationships to public and private space within the urban environment, the institutions that define it, our agency as city dwellers within the contemporary urban milieu and the role of the arts and artists in shaping how we experience or engage with these environments.

Based in the industrial centre of Windsor, Ontario, the collective’s work has often deployed their hometown as source of inspiration, testing laboratory and a stand in for the hundreds of other communities across the country seeking to redefine their identities in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.

This exhibition explores the group’s relationship to Windsor through revisiting their earliest works and illustrating how those works have shaped and defined their undertakings in communities across the country.

About the Artists

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.

The processes of Broken City Lab remain grounded in the lab’s observations and concerns about Windsor, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city.

Broken City Lab’s creative activity is rooted in community-based social practice, where the lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace.

This exhibition is supported by the Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant.

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Also on September 14 & 15 in Hamilton:

Broken City Catalogue Launch – Friday Sept 14 and Sat Sept 15th, 7-11 pm, in the foyer of Hamilton Artists Inc. including distribution of fibre-based works from the installation on the Cannon St Wall.
Curated by Julie Rene de Cotret.