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Psychogeography Walk in Windsor

Pedestrian scramble time-lapse by Sam Javanrouh, from Spacing Magazine

Tomorrow night, December 28th, at 8pm, Spacing Magazine‘s Shawn Micallef  (in conjunction with Scaledown.ca and InternationalMetropolis.com) will be hosting a Psychogeographic Walk through Windsor. The walk will start and end at Phog and will consist of a simple algorithm to get people moving through the city. After everyone comes back, the routes will get mapped, highlighting discovered details and personal landmarks. 

For more information and to hear the PSA running on CJAM, check out the post on ScaleDown.

PS. The image above has nothing to do with Windsor or psychogeography, but is a still from a Pedestrian Scramble time-lapse video made by Sam Javanrouh that I saw (and liked) on Spacing Magazine’s website.

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Text On Ice

You Changed Everything, Text On Ice - installed in Windsor, Ontario

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks developing this project, and somehow waited until the coldest night yet to install the first successful Text On Ice (You Changed Everything) project. I’ll post some more details on the (ongoing) process later this week, but wanted to get this image up first.

This first iteration of the project is mounted via monofilament line, basically just tied to the fence. The plan is to embed the line into the ice on future versions of the project. The text will also change from work to work. 

Considering how cold it is this year in Windsor, it’s actually a good time to do this project, as it likely won’t melt for a while.

Continue reading “Text On Ice”

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Tools for Actions

Canadian Centre for Architecture's Tools for Actions website

I saw an ad for CCA‘s Actions: What You Can Do With the City exhibition in the current issue of Border Crossings and the title got the best of me. I quickly flipped through the rest of the magazine, then went about exploring the Tools for Actions website.

On the site, you’ll find 99 actions, ranging from a seed bomb missile launcher to the Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s Map of Least Surveillance. There’s a lot to look at and ideas abound, feel free to note any particularly interesting projects in the comments.

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Art Shanty!

Ice Shanty

“Art Shanty Projects is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.”

As you can see, they have experimented with ice lettering in a more permanent fashion.  These are more like ice gravestones, aside from the text.  I think ours could be more thoughtful, but it’s nice to see examples of something we’d like to accomplish.

It’s also an interesting idea to create an artistic community for a set period of time in a temporary natural setting.

Continue reading “Art Shanty!”

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Neglected Energy

Joshua Allen Harris

This work is by a New York base artist named Joshua Allen Harris, who creates characters that essentially become alive and animated once they harness unused, unrealized city energy. i.e. Air conditioning units, subway trains, fans etc.

I really like this idea of trapping energy and illustrating/quantifying it and infusing it with an unnatural property to animate it in some way.

Can we give the surplus of superfluous Windsor energy a colour, a materiality or a taste?

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Hektor, the Spray-Paint Output Device

I was looking through the book, Design and the Elastic Mind, which accompanied the eponymous exhibit, and came across Hektor. I had seen this somewhere before, or something like it anyways, on my Internet travels, but glad I was reminded of it, as it is surely worth a post. 

Hektor is a simple 2-motor controlled plotter that has toothed belts and a can holder that handles regular spray cans. By programming a graphic in Illustrator using the Scriptographer plugin, you can have Hektor output nearly anything. It was created in close collaboration with engineer Uli Franke for Jürg Lehni’s diploma project at écal (école cantonale d’art de Lausanne) in 2002.

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2009 Strategic Plan

Planning out the next year's worth of repairs for this broken city

We spent last night sketching out all of the repairs we could think of for the coming year (a Broken City Lab strategic plan of sorts). It took a couple of hours, 15 markers, and about 30 square feet of paper (see the whole image), but we came up with some very exciting ideas. Among them:

Broken City Symposium, Leddy Microfiche Exhibition, (Gallery) Slumber Parties, Parking Garage Rooftop Screenings,Telephone Pole Suggestion Boxes, Handcrafted “Parking Tickets”, Small-Scale Exhibitions in Cars, A Parade

We’ll have office hours again in the new year. In the meantime, we’re working on LED signs and Ice Block texts (more soon).

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Untitled Sign No. 2

Untitled Sign No 2 by Kasper Sonne

This building vaguely reminded me of something on the University of Windsor campus…  this could be somewhere near Leddy library or Essex Hall. It’s actually part of the Tempo Skien Annual Temporary Outdoor Exhibition, in Norway.

The work is by Kasper Sonne, who regularly works with text in his gallery and public work.

If the University of Windsor was really smart, they would get that awful yellow sign down from atop of the residence building so readily legible from the Ambassador Bridge and make that space an annual international public art competition. They could attract artists from across the world to make work that could be seen by an international audience every single day.

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Office Hours

Windsor is Lame, Then Go to Detroit - text found on desk in leddy library

We’re holding Office Hours on Tuesday, December 16th, 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 planning out a year’s worth of repairs. These will likely be the last Broken City Lab office hours for 2008.