It’s been a busy last week, getting back from Victoria, and launching the Text In-Transit Call For Submissions, but we still had time to meet for our weekly Office Hours and continue working with the Massey Physics Club. Our adventures in paper making for an upcoming planters project we have in mind, and in learning more high school physics and math are after the jump.
Text In-Transit is a Broken City Lab project where we’re partnering with Transit Windsor to install a number of text-based creative works amongst the ads in the headspace on buses. We’re looking for submissions of short statements, poems, and stories from anyone in the city that will help to change the conversation about Windsor!!!
*** Please send your submission(s) to info@brokencitylab.org by March 20, 2009.
We’ll be curating the submissions, so feel free to send more than one. As well, this project is made possible by Transit Windsor, OPIRG, MYAC and The Arts Society at the University of Windsor.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on making blocks of ice with letters and text embedded in them to create temporary street art. I think this idea came out of working with wheat paste, realizing the enjoyment of working in public spaces, and wanting to continue to work throughout the winter.
I liked developing and working on this project for a number of reasons—especially the durational experience of freezing a number of blocks of ice, cutting out the paper letters, then slowly covering those letters with thin layers of ice, eventually securely embedding them into the blocks.
After the jump, there are some step-by-step photos and documentation of our learning process.
At Windsor’s riverfront, SAVE A CITY, installed this afternoon. We opted out of using monofilament to hang the blocks of ice because there was a nice snowbank already there, and probably the last thing the Detroit River needs is more garbage in it. I’ll post some photos of the process of making these soon (definitely before the weather gets too warm).
Broken City Lab Office Hours last night were hugely productive due, in no small part, to the many amazing people around the table last night. We completed a test with the flagging tape at Lebel (as you can see above) for the EC Row project and continued working on the LED sign. There’s lots of pictures of all the action after the jump.
From what I understand, Google Maps updates once a year or so (I’d guess even less than that). So, I think now would be a good time to start on a project like this, as according to these maps, Caesar’s Windsor is still under construction.
That parking garage on the corner of Park and Pelissier would be a fantastic candidate for a project like this. I think noting to the world that “we’re still alive” is going to be increasingly important, as Windsor continues to have the highest unemployment rate in Canada.
We spent part of Monday afternoon doing a site visit for an upcoming project we’ve been planning for a while. The EC Row Walkway crosses over the 6 lanes of EC Row and is a pretty incredible view. We took some measurements and did a quick visibility test. We were only up there for about fifteen minutes, but there were a lot of people honking, which makes me suspect this walkway is pretty underutilized. Photos after the jump.
On Monday morning we set out all of the stuff that we figured we would need to start figuring out how to make an LED sign (+ some other things that aren’t really necessary for this project). We cut wires, soldered, used resistors, and mocked up a circuit on a breadboard and it was really, really fun. Lots of photos after the jump.
Continue reading “Soldering LEDs + Other Adventures in Electricity”
300′ of bright orange flagging tape, $5.97 + tax. It’s fairly thin, but should be really easy to work with. We might have to double it up to make it visible on the fence, that is, double the width of each letter. We should test at Lebel later this week, or maybe on Monday before we go out for a site visit and measurements.
Another iteration of our Text On Ice series, this time spelling out, “Let’s Be Friends” and mounted on a fence bordering the Forster Secondary School‘s field.