By Justin on April 30th, 2009, 11:20 am 5 Comments

After taking a week off, Broken City Lab Office Hours started up again with a focus on getting a number of the shells for the magnetic planters completed. It was a really productive meeting with some more welcomed new faces and a whole bunch of planters now ready for the next step. It wasn’t all fun though, we lost an invaluable BCL member—Mike’s blender.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL blender community garden magnetic paper planters pulp research shopping

By Darren on April 29th, 2009, 12:09 pm 3 Comments

After Nicole and Samantha visited BCL’s Office Hours last night, it was great to see some of their creative artwork downtown today on the bike racks out front of Phog.

Tagged: knitting

By Justin on April 28th, 2009, 10:41 am 0 Comments

re:farm the city is a low-tech urban / community garden project of sorts. The image above is a part of that low tech. This is a simple monitoring system developed using Arduino and Processing that will track humidity levels in six planters and alert the gardener if they get too low (essentially broadcasting that they are in need of watering).

The project is aimed at developing a series of tools that would enable city-dwellers to grow and monitor an urban garden using open-software and open-hardware and as much recycled materials as possible. It also focuses on new ways of visualizing and understanding relationships between plants situated in close or distanced proximity to one another.

I’ve been anxious to get into learning more Arduino for a while, but we haven’t seemed to have an appropriate project as of yet. Maybe there are some ways to include some technology that would aid in the educational element of our community garden…

[via  we make money not art ]

Tagged: arduino community context garden open source processing urban

By Justin on April 26th, 2009, 5:09 pm 9 Comments

The rain held off, so today was a good day to get out and do some field tests for our magnetic planters. We just stuck around the neighbourhood, but did a general test to see what surfaces were magnetic. Unfortunately, the street signs that I had anticipated being a perfect surface for these are not magnetic, but chain link fences are, along with some other random surfaces.

We’ll continue with research on making these planters this week, but also start to think of what we can stamp / stencil / draw onto the flat surface of these.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL fence field test magnetic planters research surfaces

By Justin on April 26th, 2009, 1:46 am 0 Comments

Broken City Lab office hours are back on for Tuesday, April 28, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. There’s lots to talk about and brainstorm since summer has now officially begun … 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 April 25th, 2009, 2:49 pm 10 Comments

Continuing with the magnetic planters research, the wild flower seeds have begun to sprout and the development of the planter itself continues. Its strength has held up pretty well, but there are some issues with the wheat paste. So still some work to do, but there’s lots of documentation of the progress so far.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL magnets mould newspaper planters recycle research wild flowers

By Justin on April 24th, 2009, 3:42 pm 3 Comments

An article on Flint, Michigan in the New York Times earlier this week discussed the proposal for the intensifying and speeding up of the city’s decline—and it might be genius. Don’t wait for houses to become abandoned before they get demolished, instead pull down entire neighbourhoods and move the population. Concentrate everyone remaining in the city to a few key areas, and build that density.

In short, planned shrinkage.

I don’t think Windsor is quite this bad; though this could very well be coming down the pipes sooner than we expect. The fallout of the current economic realities is slowly being realized across the city, but if you really want to imagine Windsor in 10 years if we don’t make some radical change, just go for a drive down Indian Road (or anywhere in the West end, really).

So, if you were offered a similar place to where you live now, but in a denser area, would you take it?

Tagged: cities Flint Michigan neighbourhood shrinking Windsor

By Justin on April 23rd, 2009, 12:46 am 0 Comments

Back at the end of March, we went on an Algorithmic Walk with some brave folks (who not only trusted in our custom software generated algorithm, but also ignored the weather). I had previously posted a link to where you could find a custom-assembled algorithm, should you be curious to try it on your own, but I also wanted to post the code, in case anyone has any need for generating  a randomly assembled text.

So, after the jump, there’s the PHP code for those interested. I’ve tried to make helpful comments throughout, and the text is sized to fit on an 8.5 x 11″ page if you want to print it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: algorithm code how to PHP research

By Justin on April 22nd, 2009, 1:29 am 5 Comments

Homeshop is a collective, a public/private space, an intersection of new art audiences and traditional art markets, a collaborative social practice, and could be an incredible model for thinking about the many vacant storefronts in Windsor. Homeshop is an apartment, an open studio, and a gallery.

I read about Homeshop in an article in the newest issue of the e-flux journal #5 (which I can absolutely recommend going through in its entirity), and the excitement around the potential of this type of organization and use of space was impossible to ignore.

So why continue to think about the impossibility of affording spaces for individual artists in the city, or the seemingly dwindling support for arts in the city, or any traditional route for production / exhibition? This is not to negate the existing infrastructures we have (and cherish), but just to suggest that there are new models for collective and collaborative space and production that could help Windsor is infinite ways.

What if you could rent a storefront downtown, have a small apartment space in the back, and a studio / gallery up front for the same rent you pay now?

Tagged: China collaborative collective context gallery live/work public

By Justin on April 21st, 2009, 10:32 am 1 Comments

There’s been a few times that I’ve wanted to turn a number of stills photos into a Quicktime movie. Sometimes it’s for time-lapse or to just present a sequence of stills as a video, like we did for the Making Things Happen promo video. So, this quick how-to is as much a reminder for myself for the next time I want to do this, as for anyone else.

The first step as you can see above is to create an album containing all the photos you want to turn into a video, select all the photos in the album, then choose Batch Change from the Photos menu.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: automator how to iphoto time-lapse