By Justin on August 31st, 2009, 10:15 am 0 Comments

Andrew Hunter’s DodoLab, an experimental co-creative lab for engaging with communities, organizations and events, headed east last week to do a series of workshops and activities around Charlottetown’s ecology and environment.

Our schedules couldn’t align (again) so we missed an amazing trip to PEI, but DodoLab carried out a massive seed bomb workshop using our recipe and offered hundreds of seed bombs to the folks passing through the market!

Alongside the seed bombs, there were a number of other projects led by fellow DodoLab researchers and students from CHARTS that looked at landscape, the experimental farm, cartography, and the wire worm (a species that can decimate a potato crop).

So, while we missed another round of collaborative research opportunities, we’re looking into further collaborations between DodoLab and Broken City Lab, hopefully picking up later this fall or winter based a little closer to home.

Tagged: BCL Charlottetown dodolab PEI seed bombs

By Justin on August 29th, 2009, 1:44 am 7 Comments

Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden.

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Tagged: BCL installation interventions magnetic planters plants research

By Justin on August 28th, 2009, 9:49 am 0 Comments

Text In-Transit on the Windsor/Detroit tunnel bus this morning. So perfect, this is exactly where we would have hoped to see this panel! Thanks for taking the photo, Robert!

[via robertbwright's twitter]

Tagged: bus Detroit Text In-Transit tunnel Windsor

By Justin on August 26th, 2009, 1:04 am 2 Comments

An interesting article over at BLDGBLOG imagines new options for cities facing huge deficits, essentially asking: if you didn’t pay taxes, would you be willing to pay higher fees for service, or would you rather pay even higher sales taxes and have zero fees attached to any municipal use or service?

Could an entire rethinking of city services and tax structure do anything to save a destroyed infrastructure system?  Are there economies that depend on the pay per use model (as in, what would the meter reader people do for work in a city with a large lump sum paid once per year)? And, is it inevitable that cities move towards a subscription-based model of service, where you choose a package at a specific price-point for the things you actually use?

Anyways, many questions, but certainly worth a read …

Photo by compujeramey.

Tagged: city fee infrastructure parking taxes

By Justin on August 25th, 2009, 12:50 pm 1 Comments

Designed at MIT, this robotic fish can swim to detect environmental pollutants in the water and inspect oil and gas pipelines.

Check Natalie Jeremijenko for interesting environmental monitoring projects that cross art and science, and imagine how good this could be for charting the flow of pollution in the Detroit River.

[via Inhabitat]

Tagged: Detroit river environment fish pollution water

By Justin on August 24th, 2009, 11:49 am 0 Comments

I don’t mean for this to be such a lazy post/reblog, but there’s a few images I’ve been meaning to post for a while. I figured they were good reference points for our magnetic planters project, among others, given the variety of display and function of these planters and the use of recycled materials (see below). So, consider this less any sort of critical discussion of these works, and more just a compilation of image research for stuff we’re doing and would like to do. That being said, I’d highly recommend following the links throughout to read more about the projects.

First up, pictured above is, “The Hanging Smoking Garden”, 2007 by Mikala Dwyer from vvork.

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Tagged: architecture gallery gardens installation plants recycle

By Josh on August 22nd, 2009, 4:25 pm 2 Comments

While camping can be an amazing experience, it usually involves some degree of planning to be successful. Imagine if you could camp on a whim without using a vehicle to haul heavy camping gear to your destination. Kevin Cyr, a Boston-based artist, created a functional camper bike back in April of last year. Even if the camper is too heavy to pull long distances, its creation still suggests that we may benefit from rethinking location permanence and our true material needs for survival.

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Tagged: bicycle camper mobile

By Justin on August 20th, 2009, 11:47 am 0 Comments

In an amazingly good interview, Daniel Fuller over at Art21’s blog discusses projects, ideas, and philosophies of social / dialogical / relational art practice with Sam Gould of Red76.

Red76 has been organizing workshops, lectures and public dialogues in “non-hierarchical” settings since 2000, most recently working on the Pop-Up Book Academy, a school which materializes behind the mask of a temporary used book store. The school utilizes the printed form as a means of investigating social politics and its histories past and present. Much of their work has been involved in working with art spaces focused on alterative pedagogy.

Gould charts a brief history of this type of art practice, attributing the social practice and relational aesthetics trajectories that emerged in late 90s and into the 2000s to difficult economic times and political conditions (that is, the transition into Bush’s presidency). He also tackles the big question, “How is this art?” by attributing the classification of this type of practice as art in the art world (and that art world being defined by museums and galleries) to a kind of laziness by the artists working within it, which is to say that while some of the work presented in this context of social practice isn’t necessarily best suited for presentation in a gallery, it becomes a type of necessity to allow it to do just that.

In reflecting on the nature of this practice, often enacted through discussions, lectures, workshops, artist talks, seminars, Gould notes that critiques and arguments of their practice often fall into two categories: efficacy (activists), or sincerity (artists). These in particular seem to be somewhat familiar questions.

And, I had to include my favourite line of the whole interview: “You don’t need an object to make it [art]. Art is the space which we define for questioning. Objects, or the lack thereof, are placeholders for ideas and propositions.”

Again, it’s a great interview and I’ve only barely skimmed the surface in my quick recap here. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re even remotely interested in the intersection of art and activism.

[via Art21]

Tagged: activism artist context interview pedagogy social practice theory

By Justin on August 20th, 2009, 9:37 am 3 Comments

We’re doing some field tests of our magnetic planters with some plants in them. Basically, we want to test to make sure the soil isn’t drying out too quickly and we’re also checking to see how well some plants respond to transplants. Above, you can see there’s a wire around the planter that helps it to keep its shape—some of the planters without a wide edge on either side are more prone to open up really wide at the top, which makes it difficult for the soil to fill the planter uniformly. Without it, the soil eventually sinks and adding any more soil would risk making the planter too heavy for the magnet.

Michelle’s running these tests, checking on the plants daily and testing a few varieties of planter shapes in preparation of the installation of all of our planters sometime in the next week or so.

Tagged: BCL fence field test magnetic planters research

By Justin on August 19th, 2009, 12:11 am 0 Comments

Another day at BCL HQ and some more progress on this ongoing magnetic planters project. Michelle and I finished putting in the remainder of our magnets into our plastic bag planters, but there are still some more planters left over. So, with more rare-earth magnets now on the way, we’ll finish up the rest when they arrive next week.

We also have a test planter in the wild now to make sure it works as we assume it’s going to work. The other tests that I’ve done indoors have been fine, with some of the mint I transplanted actually taking root, which is really exciting! It was quite interesting to see all of these individually made designs and see the range of techniques that everyone used when making the planters as Michelle and I worked with just about every one today… we imagine it will look quite great to see them all installed (temporarily) in one place filled with plants before they’re sent off to other magnetic surfaces across the city.

Tagged: BCL magnets planters research