As part of FAM Fest 09, we did a projection performance on the roof of Metro Cleaners accessed from Empire Lounge in downtown Windsor.
For about an hour and a half, we presented our 100 Ways to Save the City and then asked for ideas from the folks on the ground, at Phog, and on the Twitterverse.
After the jump, there’s 160-something photos from all the ideas that were projected on Saturday night.
Last night out a window in the county, the new projector at night.
Today, finishing our list of 100 ways to save the city.
It’s going to run as a presentation in Keynote, the easiest failsafe solution. Though, we might try to open it up on Twitter somehow later tonight.
And, speaking of tonight, the weather is looking good. No rain!!!! We’ll be projecting across from Phog, look up above Empire Lounge and you’ll see us. Tonight is marks Day 2 of FAM Fest, hope to see you out and about.
We met last night and started our list of 100 Ways to Save the City for our projection on Saturday night as part of FAM Fest.
We’re also spent some time putting together a rough schedule for 2009 Micro-Residencies, which will likely start in November. If you’ve thought about applying, but haven’t yet, now would be a great time to put forward an idea!
Last Wednesday at The Green Corridor‘s Drive-thru Symphony event I showed a projection entitled Rolling Economy. This site-specific piece served as a digital representational count of the Windsor-Detroit border trade that passes through the corridor. The piece, which lasted about an hour, was visible to those in cars and trucks coming off of the Ambassador Bridge.
TODAY in Windsor, there’s an incredible amount of activity happening. The Green Corridor will host a talk / workshop from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grant officers, two artist performances, and one huge outdoor event to bring culture to the NAFTA freeway.
Lee Rodney will launch her Border Bookmobile—a Windsor-made 1993 Plymouth Voyager stocked with a collection of artist books, theoretical texts, maps, and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world.
Jennifer Willet will conduct ongoing laboratory research and hold a bio-art workshop with the general public in the presentation of her work InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies. This piece explores the laboratory removed from its sterilized artificial setting and placed in an outside world full of environmental organisms and ecologies.
The Green Corridor along with composer Brent Lee, visual artist Sigi Torinus, Assumption High School musicians, What Seas What Shores, CJAM 91.5fm, and others will create a one-hour performance of music and visuals that interact with the passing traffic on Huron Church Road near the Pedestrian Overpass. Drivers can tune-in to the performance in near-realtime and contribute to the Drive-Thru Symphony by honking their horns, or revving their engines, or generally making noise. Broken City Lab will also be contributing through a number of projects by us as individuals.
Here’s the schedule:
1:00 – 2:30 – Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council / Integrated Arts Programs Information Session / Room 115 LeBel Building, University of Windsor
3:00 – 6:00 – Border Bookmobile, Lee Rodney / InsideOut: Labratory Ecologies, Jennifer Willet
8:00 – 9:30 – Drive thru Sympony Performance / Nature Bridge Pedestrian Overpass / Huron Church Rd. at Millen St.
This is going to be an amazing event, dare I say, history-making. You need to be there.
This week is Humanities Week 2009, presented by Humanities Research Group (HRG), and it’s focusing on urbanism, cities, and the past and the future of Windsor / Detroit.
Here’s the rundown of the events, which I copied / cut / pasted, so please excuse the list:
Tuesday 22 September • Philosophers’ Café 8pm • Phog Lounge, 157 University Avenue West – Come participate in a wide-ranging discussion concerning cities, their possible futures, and the future of Windsor with Justin Langlois [Broken City Lab], Tom Lucier [Phog, tomlucier.com], Melinda Munro [City of Windsor], and Jeff Noonan [Philosophy, University of Windsor]. Cash bar.
Wednesday 23 September • MASSH Lecture on the history of medicine in Windsor and Detroit, in a talk entitled “Border Cities Medicine: Towards a History of Medical Practitioners in Windsor.” Lecture 4.30pm • Room 1115, Medical Education Building, University of Windsor
Thursday 24 September • HRG Distinguished Speakers’ Series 7.30pm, Jerry Herron, professor of English and American Studies, Wayne State University, will give a talk entitled, “Borderama Detroit,” which will explore the city as a spectacle, and what Detroit, that ‘life-in-death’ city, means for the future of urban areas around the world. • Freed Orman Centre, Assumption University
Friday 25 September • HRG Colloquium 10am • Location to be communicated – “How Not to See Detroit: What Tourists Always Get Wrong When They Come to Look at Us, and What One Got Exactly Right” is a wide-ranging discussion with Jerry Herron about Detroit and the way it has been documented by the photographer Corine Vermeulen-Smith. Seating is limited; contact the HRG office for more information and to register.
There’s a lot going on this week, so contact HRG for more information on any specific part of the activity you see listed above, but plan to attend at least one of these events if your schedule permits!
Consider this required reading: over at Spacing.ca, Shawn Micallef wrote about one his more recent trips to his former hometown, Windsor. Driving down Walker Road again after spending much of his time in Toronto walking, a lot, made him realize just how staggeringly huge these auto plants are, and he questions what we’re all wondering—what will happen when these plants entirely shut down?
Go, read it.
Thanks for passing this along, Rod.
Text In-Transit on the Windsor/Detroit tunnel bus this morning. So perfect, this is exactly where we would have hoped to see this panel! Thanks for taking the photo, Robert!
[via robertbwright’s twitter]
We’ll give you a place to stay and resources for 72 hours. You’ll help us fix the city.
For the last year, we’ve been working away on a number of initiatives that have come out of our very specific examinations of Windsor, Ontario. The ways in which we see, experience, and move through the city have defined our tactical investigations and have, by design, been based on our deeply embedded concerns about our city.
We’re now looking to expand our research and our understanding of our city by inviting other artists, designers, writers, curators, architects, filmmakers, philosophers, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and students to come stay with us for 72 hours. We’re looking for collaborators who are generous, energetic, and interested in understanding Windsor. We’re not necessarily looking for completed ideas, but rather general concerns you would like to investigate and workshop over three days.
We can’t offer any money, but we can offer a bed.
We won’t do anything illegal, but we will give you our energy and ideas.
If you can get to Windsor, we can make this happen.
Should this opportunity interest you, please apply using the Micro-Residency Submission Form.
As part of the Green Corridor‘s Open Corridor festival, Windsor’s Lucy Howe installed a series of wilted road signs, entitled Wilt. The signs themselves reiterate the bend, or wilt, in its respective sign pole and simultaneously comments on some of the many issues surrounding this stretch of road, and the kilometer or so to its north. The signs were originally installed as pictured above, but shortly after their installation, a City of Windsor truck came by to take them down.
Thankfully, the signs were recovered before being carted away and are now installed on the Northeast corner of Huron Church and College.
Howe’s work has an incredibly fun way of intervening with infrastructure and the everyday. All of the work is amazingly labour intensive, but so expertly pulled off that it can make you continually guess at its sincerity in the best way possible. If you’ve been to the AGW lately, you would have seen her work—a drooping chair and melting wall on the second floor as part of the Biennial.
Howe has another work in her archives that I’m hoping she’ll work on again, if the right place can be found. The work involves reshaping a chain link fence’s form and function, how could I not be in love?