By Josh on November 29th, 2008, 12:24 pm 0 Comments

I came across this last week while I was browsing for sound artists. It’s basically a collaborative sound art project directed by Agricola de Cologne, New Media curator and media artist from Cologne/Germany. There are  currently 10 curators and their contributions featuring about 200 sound art works from about 150 artists.

“SoundLAB is focusing on thematic aspects, i.e “memory and identity” and related themes, and is developed for being presented in physical space in media exhibitions and festivals, as well as in virtual space as streaming applications in online environments…”

I find the site a bit overwhelming, but like the ‘soundworks‘ section which features samples of current sound artworks. Listening to them one at a time is good, but playing a few at once is the real fun. This seems like a good example of current sound art and might be inspiration for any sound work we might create.

Tagged: context interactive lab Soundart

By Justin on November 29th, 2008, 12:39 am 8 Comments

We spent the last couple of daylight hours on Friday working with rope and one of the fences at LeBel. We needed to test some techniques for communicating via rope (or ribbon, as we later decided) on a fence for another project. After moving inside to the warmth, we also settled on a preferred material, our message, and a potential location. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL fence research ribbon rope text

By Justin on November 26th, 2008, 9:15 am 4 Comments

Next Tuesday night, December 2nd, at 7pm, Broken City Lab will be holding a Social Mapping Event, where we’ll use the tools Google gave us and highlight potential study areas (and broken points of interest)—the Google Map itself will be made public afterwards. We’ll also make a screencast of the process and make it available on the website afterwards.

So, if you’ve been meaning to come out to our weekly Office Hours, but haven’t had the time yet, clear your schedule for next Tuesday.

Tagged: BCL google maps office hours participation Windsor

By Justin on November 25th, 2008, 1:26 pm 1 Comments

Danielle and I will be participating in Work in Progress #2, an MFA/Faculty forum held semi-regularly at the School of Visual Arts. We’ll discuss Broken City Lab and, as Lee Rodney so fittingly put it, “the extreme adventures of artist collectives and collaborations.” As well, Lee will be discussing her new project, a Detroit-Windsor Bookmobile. Plus apple cider! 

The details: Wednesday, December 3 @ 7pm, Room 115, LeBel.

Tagged: BCL event talk

By Justin on November 25th, 2008, 11:36 am 3 Comments

I’ve been pointed to Learning To Love You More on a number of occasions, though it’s only recently that I’ve dug into the site a little bit more. The project was initiated by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher in 2002 and works around the assignments that participants are supposed to complete and document and send back to be posted on the website (and sometimes included in a book, an exhibition, a screening, or a radio broadcast). The image above is from Assignment #63 – Make an Encouraging Banner. I think if I were to have made a banner, it might have been something like that one.

That the project does get a fair amount of participants is inspiring, but the thing I like the most are the ideas of the assignments themselves and the fact that they exist, that they were written down, thought about, and attempted. Making a list is, at the very least, a starting point of fixing something.

Tagged: art context love participation website

By Michelle on November 24th, 2008, 12:15 pm 4 Comments

Broken City Lab has been nominated in a variety if categories for this years Canadian Blog Awards including:

Best Blog

Best New Blog

Best Local Blog

Best Group Blog

Best Activities Blog

First round voting is currently underway. VOTE!

Tagged: awards Blog canadian blog awards vote

By Justin on November 23rd, 2008, 9:19 pm 1 Comments

Once again, you are cordially invited to our Broken City Lab office hours / team huddle on Tuesday, November 25th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be discussing upcoming projects, ongoing research, and recipes for Christmas cookies.

Tagged: BCL Lebel office hours

By Justin on November 23rd, 2008, 5:18 pm 7 Comments

After some considerable thought, I decided to move BrokenCityLab.org over to Wordpress. Previously, the site had been running on a basic CMS system I wrote myself. My hope is that this move will enable a more stable back-end for posting, commenting, etc, and keep me from having to do any heavy maintenance in PHP.  

If you subscribed via RSS before, please adjust your reader to point to the new feed. You might notice that older comments are missing, but we’re going to work on this—the transition has been a fairly manual process, and so a bit more time-consuming than I would have liked, but I think most everything is in order now.

However, if you do stumble across anything strange, please let me know.

Tagged: BCL website

By Josh on November 21st, 2008, 8:51 pm 4 Comments

I have been interested in field recording and found sound as of late, but do not know of many artists. I stumbled across an experimental electronic sound artist named Stephen Vitiello. He uses atmospheric noises for most of his audio work and has worked with artists such as Tony Oursler and Julie Mehretu.

“In 1999 he was awarded a studio for six months on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower One, where he recorded the cracking noises of the building swaying under the stress of the winds after Hurricane Floyd.”

I had a hard time finding visual documentation of his sound installations besides a short video of a project called “Flutter“, which was a collaboration with Molly Berg at the World Financial Center in NY.

I really like the idea of using the vertical space and atmosphere of a building to create sound. I can think of at least one building at the University of Windsor with the height to accomodate a project such as this.

Tagged: parachutes sound

By Justin on November 21st, 2008, 9:38 am 3 Comments

In a post on MAKE about how to embed 720p videos from YouTube, I found this great, short video about the history of LEDs and some quick notes at the end about the simplest way to make them work. I’m on the case of looking into getting a bulk order of LEDs from DigiKey.

Oh, and to embed 720p video (when available) add this to the embed source &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 or add this to the url just to watch a video on the YouTube page in 720p &fmt=22 … adding &fmt=18 will make any video play in high-quality h264 encoding.

Tagged: history how to LED make youtube