By Justin on March 31st, 2009, 8:53 am 0 Comments

Graffiti Research Lab, FAT Lab, and a number of likely affiliated technologists, artists, and graffiti writers are spending the week working on an eye-tracking system attached to a pair of plastic frame glasses to write graffiti with light. From what I gather, this would allow them to avoid using those super-powerful lasers.

Follow their adventures on the blog, or on their own twitter-esque microblogging tool, fucktwitter, based on the free software, Laconica.

Tagged: camera context eye graffiti software technology tracking

By Justin on March 30th, 2009, 4:51 pm 0 Comments

Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, March 31st, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. You are invited! There is lots on the table, as it may be official that spring is here. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!

Tagged: BCL Lebel office hours

By Justin on March 30th, 2009, 10:28 am 5 Comments

I picked up five test panels on Friday from the printers and got a test shot of them installed on the buses. These first five panels were made up internally at BCL (we still haven’t had the chance to start going through all the submissions yet). I’ll be going back to the downtown terminal this evening to actually install the five test panels on a couple of buses, so keep an eye out for them over the next week.

I’ll post some more photos of the panels installed tomorrow.

Tagged: BCL installation research text Text In-Transit transit Windsor

By Justin on March 27th, 2009, 12:29 pm 2 Comments

Work Worth Doing is an interdisciplinary design studio working to understand the intersection of design, society, and the environment. They’ve been working on retrofitting wartime homes with sustainable design and technologies, getting them down to zero energy use through affordable practices. This model would be a no-brainer for any city, but particular Windsor, which has a huge number of neighbourhoods scattered with wartime bungalows. It’s also similar to the Green Corridor’s Ecohouse initiative, which is still underway.

Oh, and by the way, this is happening in Windsor.

The Windsor Essex Community Housing Corporation has 125 wartime homes in their portfolio of social housing. The Now House Project team is working with Windsor Essex CHC to design the retrofit of five houses in their portfolio to net zero energy use and greatly reduced operating costs. The houses would serve as demonstrations for the possible retrofit of the other wartime homes in the portfolio. Work Worth Doing is the head consultant on this project in Windsor, which will also involve St. Clair College students, and maybe also University of Windsor students.

Tagged: context design energy house renovate sustainable Windsor

By Cristina on March 26th, 2009, 9:28 am 0 Comments

Amy Franceschini of San Francisco, is a contemporary American artist and designer who’s practices span from drawing, painting, sculpture, design, net art, public art and gardening. She teaches media theory and practice courses at both Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute.

In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers as a way to bring together multidisciplinary art practitioners to bring together new work. They are, “teachers, researchers, designers, gardeners, scientists, engineers, illustrators, people who know how to sew, pattern makers, cooks and bus drivers with a common interest in creating work that challenge current social, political and economic systems.” Amy Franceschini explains, “The name [Futurefarmers] is a product of my childhood,” explaining the influences of her father, a corporate farmer and owner of a pesticide company, and her mother, a New Age type devoted to the notion of organic farming.

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Tagged: activism amy franceschini civic cycle context futurefarmers gardening rainwater/greywater freedback loop victory gardens

By Justin on March 24th, 2009, 11:19 pm 0 Comments

It’s a product made by MIO from recycled paper, and is available at Target, but I mainly wanted to post this as a note. As we’ve now “mastered” the process of making paper, we should consider different shapes for the planters we’re working on, which will likely help to guide the process of making the planter frames from the wire we have.

[via Inhabitat]

Tagged: paper plants projects recycle

By Justin on March 24th, 2009, 12:40 am 2 Comments

I saw this on Render’s blog, and considering our work towards an artist-led community garden, I had to repost it. Not much to look at lightly dusted in snow, but the idea is incredibly great.

Running from April 2009 to the following winter, GROUNDWORK will function as a community garden and creative research site. The project will take place on the grounds of Rare, a 913-acre nature preservation and agriculture education site located on the Grand River between Galt and Blair. GROUNDWORK will bring together a core creative group of a dozen youth from the Gaweni:io School (Six Nations) and Waterloo Collegiate Institute’s Collision group to develop and cultivate a community garden/site of creative research and knowledge-sharing.

The community-outreach on this project is considerable, and it’s projects like these that involve such deep integration and collaboration with different parts of a community (and it seems Render is taking on more and more of them) that really interests me as an artist and parallels some of the bigger things I think we’d like to do in BCL.

Tagged: community context garden nature youth

By Justin on March 22nd, 2009, 10:44 pm 0 Comments

Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, March 24, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll be working on plans for the community garden project, some guerilla gardening things, and likely going through some of the Text In-Transit submissions! If anyone has anything else they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!

Tagged: BCL Lebel office hours

By Justin on March 20th, 2009, 5:00 pm 7 Comments

SCAVENGE THE CITY: An Algorithmic Walk with Broken City Lab is happening on Sunday, March 29th at 6pm. Starting at Phog Lounge, we’ll be handing out a custom algorithm (a set of instructions), using a fancy computer program that we write, to take you and whomever you want to walk with, around the downtownish area of Windsor to discover, uncover, note, photograph, and invent. 

This isn’t a traditional scavenger hunt—we won’t be placing anything around the city for you to find—instead, the instructions will ask you to do specific things in less specific places, to try to encourage not just experiencing new places, but experience them in new ways.

The walk should wrap up by 10pm and then back at Phog we’ll share stories, videos, photographs, drawings, etc, of our adventures. Whether you’ve already come out to one of the previous hugely successful walking themed events in Windsor (Big Walk, or the Spacing Walk) or haven’t taken a stroll downtown in years, we would love to have you share on this adventure with us!!!

Tagged: algorithm BCL research walk Windsor

By Josh on March 20th, 2009, 10:00 am 0 Comments

This short film was shot by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California, USA. I do not think this project needs any description from me, so I’ll present you with the link to the main site where footage can be found. The following is a summary of the goal of this project.

“The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons.”

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Tagged: magnetic science video