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BCL’s 1 Year Anniversary

a cake, courtesy of the Evernote blog

Today is the 1 year anniversary of the conversation I had with Danielle that sparked the idea for Broken City Lab. We had just finished eating dinner, I was doing the dishes, and we were talking about what protest means today, and  how to move beyond protest towards social change. Right after the conversation, I wrote a one-page description of what a concentrated effort to change things in the city incrementally through artistic practice might look like and titled it Broken City Lab.

It wasn’t until later on in the summer last year that a few of us got together as Broken City Lab, and we started to carve out, rewrite, rethink, and actually do the things that has made BCL what it is now. I just wanted to make a little note, even just for myself, about what was happening a year ago and what we’ve done since then. 

So, as an anniversary gift to you, here are some interesting things I’ve read and seen recently:

Detroit House: $100. Bold New Ideas for the City: Priceless.

GREENING THE REVOLUTION

Christian Robert-Tissot’s Nature Morte  (via vvork)

In Hard Times, Public Places are More Important Than Ever

Happy March 19th!

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Installing YOU ARE AMAZING

Michelle installing YOU ARE AMAZING

We got up early and headed down to the EC Row pedestrian overpass between the Dominion and Huron Church exits to install YOU ARE AMAZING! It’s hard to describe what it felt like to do this—taking on this project gave us all a genuine excitement about participating in changing a part of Windsor and the way we interact with it, even if it’s just for a moment. Windsor needs a lot of things, but I think maybe most importantly, it needs a little encouragement.

There was a lot of great documentation, with many photos after the jump, and a video on the way.

Continue reading “Installing YOU ARE AMAZING”

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Redesigning Fences

Thinking about the many ways to work with fences, given that we seem to continually insist of putting them up, I found a couple examples lately of artists and designers working to interweave new patterns into chain link fence.

lace fence' by joep & jeroen verhoeven van demakersvan

“Lace Fence” by Joep & Jeroen Verhoeven van Demakersvan

"L'Univers", 2007 by Nicolas Milhé.

“L’Univers”, 2007 by Nicolas Milhé.

a strategy not fully exploited

A Windsor strategy not fully exploited. Inserting vertical (or horizontal for that matter) strips of plastic of material into a fence could allow other patterns to emerge.

[via DesignBoom & vvork]

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New Text In-Transit Submission Form!

Text In-Transit Submission Form by Steven Cochrane

Courtesy of the always brilliant Steven …

There’s now a new submission form that allows you to get a quick preview of what your Text In-Transit panel could look like, along with a fun little colour swatch. If you’ve already submitted, it’s worth submitting more just to try this out, and if you haven’t submitted yet—get on it!!!

Check out the NEW Text In-Transit Call for Submissions page!

Or if you’re more comfortable with an old fashioned email, that’s still fine too.

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Eclipse – Park Pollution Visualization

Eclipse

It seems I keep running into projects that attempt to visualize pollution levels. I’m not sure what intrigues me about this particular project, but I do connect with it on some level. I might just be drawn to projects which use real-time or near-real-time data. Here is a summary this project’s purpose.

“Eclipse is an interactive artwork that alters and corrupts appropriated photographs of United States national and state parks based on real-time Air Quality Index readings from the web (AQI or particle pollution data is available from airnow.gov). Eclipse was commissioned by Turbulence.org and was created by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir, who produce ecoarttech.net.”

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Text In-Transit: Call For Submissions

Text In-Transit: Call for Submissions

Text In-Transit is a Broken City Lab project where we’re partnering with Transit Windsor to install a number of text-based creative works amongst the ads in the headspace on buses. We’re looking for submissions of short statements, poems, and stories from anyone in the city that will help to change the conversation about Windsor!!!

*** Please send your submission(s) to info@brokencitylab.org by March 20, 2009.

We’ll be curating the submissions, so feel free to send more than one. As well, this project is made possible by Transit Windsor, OPIRG, MYAC and The Arts Society at the University of Windsor.

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Jenny Holzer’s Projection for Chicago

After meeting with Massey’s Junior Physics Club again today and then discussing that project further at tonight’s Office Hours, trying to figure out exactly what we need to do to make a really large-scale projection happen, I saw this video on Jenny Holzer’s latest Projection for Chicago, as part of her ongoing Xenon Projections series.

Check out the size of her projector near the beginning—insanely huge, but also insanely bright.

[via Art21]

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Office Hours

Broken City Lab office hours, bunnies at university of victoria

Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, March 10, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Fresh off a week in the gallery, a conference in Victoria, and realizing a campus just needs some wildlife to make it better, this week’s office hours should be awesome. Sorry the post is late!