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CAKFA.11: Reflect on Here

Reflect on Here, text installation at CAFKA by Broken City Lab

Reflect on Here, text installation at CAFKA by Broken City Lab

After months and months of work, we finally installed our project for CAFKA.11. Led by Josh, Hiba, Kevin, and myself, the project took an incredible amount of research and build time, but we were incredibly excited to see our efforts finally in place in front of Kitchener’s City Hall when we wrapped up the installation last night.

Reflect on Here calls on passersby to think on the infrastructure of the city, the attempt to create place with architecture, and the materiality of the text itself. This project was made possible with the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council‘s Exhibition Assistance Program and the incredible team at CAFKA.

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Installing at Forest City Gallery

We spent the weekend in London, Ontario. We were installing for our upcoming exhibition at Forest City Gallery, while also briefly wondering about what it would be like to not do site specific work. Anyways, you should plan to come to the opening on September 9th!

We’re working on an installation using our “…and then the city” framework for exploring and unfolding the layers of narrative that go into shaping a place. We’ve pulled together some historical overviews of London, but have really enjoyed using an online questionnaire to hear about some of the narratives on the ground here. Huge thanks to Forest City Gallery and London Fuse for helping to spread the word. All of the answers have fed into the installation in some way, so it’s been a really effective way to get to some of the overarching stories about this city.

The show will run until October 21, 2011, and, in the meantime, what’s more fun than a peak of the install process?

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Make This Better: Drouillard Road

Here is some good news:
Amidst the biased newspaper articles and the rumoured reputations, Drouillard Road is actually in an okay place.
A year or two ago, I was irked by a few things I had read in a familiar news source, depicting residents as downtrodden and troublesome, crimes and drug deals treated as the norm. But I knew better than to believe one reporter’s opinion and assume that Drouillard Road was a place with no hope.

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ATTC Calgary: Unfolding the Cycles of a City on Billboards & in Print

On the final day of our ATTC Calgary residency, the billboards launched. We headed out in the early afternoon with Randy to document them all.

Alongside highways, on the sides of buildings in the downtown core, and mixed in with other urban-fringe architecture. The billboards stood deeply embedded and clearly removed from the landscape, at times being rotated amongst advertisements, and in other instances, acting more directly as annotations to the site of installation.

As a final trajectory of ATTC Calgary, these billboards were installed around the city noting a series of cyclical narratives. Using the phrasing, “…and then the city…” each billboard features a different statement that referenced an overarching narrative or perhaps a brief moment in time about the city, read either internally or externally. These billboards are aimed at creating a space for a momentary discussion around the possibilities in narratives themselves, which is centred on one’s personal connection, history, and knowledge on the city.

In total, TRUCK had secured us seven billboard locations spread throughout Calgary, concentrated in the downtown core and in the city’s industrial edge.

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ATTC Calgary: Projecting New Narratives of a City

Our work on ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project continued with a couple day’s break from events, allowing to focus on planning the remainder of our residency activities and starting work on our publication.

Tuesday night was our projection event around the edge of Central Memorial Park — an impeccably well-manicured green space in the middle of a downtown neighbourhood, and a welcomed surprise. A few logistical concerns aside (like having to connect seven extension cords to reach the edge of the park), we had a pretty ideal spot. A blank light-cemete wall always makes for a good projection screen.

The projections themselves were a series of text-based statements articulating of a set of narratives around Calgary that were originally based on the responses to our fill-in-the-blank statements and eventually moving on to real-time feedback and participation from those community members in attendance.

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I made an iPhone App and so can you !!!

 

For one of my last projects with Sigi Torinus as part of my BFA degree I made an iphone App.

I was able to speed up a usually lengthy process by skipping over the coding portion of creating the app. This was made possible by using Buzztouch, a web-based content management software (CMS) out of Montery California that helps build iPhone and Android apps. Buzztouch provides tools that allow people to create mobile apps and provides a back-end database to support those apps over the long-term. They do both of these things for free, for anyone. The source-code that app owners download for each of their applications is released under an open-source license.

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Steve Lambert: It’s Time to Fight

Two things I can’t get enough of — Steve Lambert and huge text signs.

Lambert’s latest work, It’s Time to Fight was installed recently in Pittsburgh, PA over a waffle shop.

Text-based work continues to inspire me; it’s accesible, layered, timely, and tactical. It can be hidden in plain sight. If you catch it, it can disrupt your experience of a landscape, and if you don’t, it patiently and quietly stands in waiting, alongside its capitalistic brethren. Text can steal our attention and interrupt our experience of space, particularly urban space, and that’s why we like working with it, I suppose.

To take a page from Josh’s book: thank you for existing, Steve Lambert.