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Embedding Magnets

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As summer rolls on, we’re continuing our work with the magnetic planters, though we now have the benefit of a front porch to enjoy the evening weather while doing so. Michelle, Josh, and I spent Monday night working on embedding the magnets into the plastic bag planters along with some more writing. We also moved some more stuff into our office and began to organize ourselves. Michelle started out by sorting the planters that had tabs on them, which allow us to fold them over the magnets and use the iron to keep them in place.

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Michelle and Josh took turns with the iron—it’s been a while since we’ve worked on them, and with a different iron, we had to work out the kinks of getting the heat exactly right.

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We finished up 25 planters, some of them requiring two magnets. Michelle and I will continue on with the rest sometime this week.

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Solutions in Deep Imagination

The Golden Institute for Energy in Colorado by Sascha Pohflepp

Sascha Pohflepp imagined a future predicated on the re-election of Jimmy Carter in 1980. In this future, there exists a think tank called, “The Golden Institute for Energy” based in Golden, Colarado, which imagines and invents new technologies to make the US the most energy-rich nation on the planet.

Capturing lightning, stealing back energy from off-ramps, and weather modification balloons are all imagined as feasible energy-generating technologies. The institute, or rather the idea of the institute, becomes a vehicle for creative and critical thought and invention, and it is more about that idea than the computer-generated images, scale models, or fake corporate videos that make Pohflepp’s project so interesting.

Rewriting and re-imagining something as huge as a national energy policy could certainly appear reckless or hopeless, but it should instead be read as hugely exciting and filled with potential. Inventing an entirely new trajectory for something so large (like say, the city of Windsor) could indeed facilitate a crucially important discussion: in the instance of Pohflepp’s project, how different would the world’s stance on climate change be if Carter had been re-elected; in the instance of imagining the future of Windsor, how bad will things get if nothing changes.

[via We Make Money Not Art]

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Learning to Transplant

some flowers

Josh and I spent some of the day in the heat collecting some interesting flowers and plants to transplant for our magnetic planters project. Overall, it was fairly successful, as we did learn quite a lot about transplanting, but we’re still going to be looking for some more plants to finish up this stage of the project (hopefully) in the next week or so.

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Google Street View’s Street Photography

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“A street view image can give us a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.”

In a guest post over at Art Fag City, Jon Rafman presents an excellent image essay on Google’s Street View feature and the many amazingly curious images its roving cars have caught since its inception two years ago.

Collected from blogs and his own Google Maps usage, Rafman pulls some of the most compelling images from Street View and attempts to articulate both the importance in studying this growing mass of images captured by computer-controlled cameras and the implications of us, as human beings, continuing to place meaning onto their subject matter, their composition, and their moral implications.

I was certainly taken by a number of the images, and undoubtedly by the writer’s design, I began to wonder what it means to see these very selected images pulled from their contextual frame of more streets, more people, and less interesting combinations thereof.

Consider this a must-read.

[via Art Fag City]

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PreFab Parks for Park(ing) Day

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Every year in New York, parking spots are taken over by people wanting to transform urban space into something more useable than concrete boxed in by painted lines under the banner of, Park(ing) Day. The even was originally imaged by San Fransisco’s Rebar, an interdisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of art, design and activism. The “small, functional, vibrant” parks that are part of Park(ing) Day each have a theme and are nearly all temporarily turfed with sod.

In the video, there’s a number of interviews highlighting people taking on the initiative for fun or for politics, but nearly all want to suggest the potential for rethinking the many, many, many parking spaces used by a single car at a time.

This certainly works given the sheer number of people in a city like New York, but if there was one parking spot in Windsor that you’d take over for a day, where would it be?

[via Worldchanging]

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The Last Couple Weeks at BCL HQ

BCL HQ

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks settling into our new headquarters, working on applications and ideas for the fall and winter. We’ve also cleared our consultancy out of the downtown space, seeing as Visual Fringe is over and it was high on the to-do list. Having a dedicated space has been incredible so far, and all we’ve done is basically set up some tables and go over some paperwork.

Needless to say that come September, with more people back in town and our schedules better aligned. our new space is going to be even more amazing.

So, as most of what we’ve been doing is somewhat scattered and in numerous Word and Excel documents and in the mail and on someone else’s desk, here’s a brief overview of our activities as of late.

Continue reading “The Last Couple Weeks at BCL HQ”

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Broken City Lab: Micro-Residencies

Broken City Lab: Micro-Residency

We’ll give you a place to stay and resources for 72 hours. You’ll help us fix the city.

For the last year, we’ve been working away on a number of initiatives that have come out of our very specific examinations of Windsor, Ontario. The ways in which we see, experience, and move through the city have defined our tactical investigations and have, by design, been based on our deeply embedded concerns about our city.

We’re now looking to expand our research and our understanding of our city by inviting other artists, designers, writers, curators, architects, filmmakers, philosophers, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and students to come stay with us for 72 hours. We’re looking for collaborators who are generous, energetic, and interested in understanding Windsor. We’re not necessarily looking for completed ideas, but rather general concerns you would like to investigate and workshop over three days.

We can’t offer any money, but we can offer a bed.

We  won’t do anything illegal, but we will give you our energy and ideas.

If you can get to Windsor, we can make this happen.

Should this opportunity interest you, please apply using the Micro-Residency Submission Form.

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Benedict Radcliffe’s “Lambo!”

Benedict Radcliffe's "Lambo!"

In the spirit of combining parades, cars, and clever sculpture, I bring you Benedict Radcliffe and Ben Wilson’s “Lambo!” functional sculpture. This project is basically a steel 3D contour drawing of a Lamborghini Countach that can be driven by two-person peddle power. I think “clever” isn’t quite strong enough to properly describe this work. Would anyone like a Lamborghini that doesn’t require any gasoline? In their words, “the work questions the combustion engine, celebrates bicycle efficiency and the striking design of the Lamborghini arguably one of the most iconic super cars of all time…”

Continue reading “Benedict Radcliffe’s “Lambo!””