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Welcome to the Neighbourhood Recap of Awesome Psychogeographic Exploration!!!

Welcome to the Neighbourhood

Welcome to the Neighbourhood took five groups of brave explorers on an adventure around West Windsor on Monday in order to highlight the potential to pay particular attention to the many things that usually go unnoticed in such a transient area.

Given that the neighbourhood surrounding the University of Windsor is made up mostly of student rental homes and the routes that many folks take to get to and from campus, inevitably we rarely get the chance to see some of the things that make this neighbourhood what it is.

So, two hours, three hundred photos, and many great stories later, our algorithmic walk was a huge success!

A quick warning, after the jump there’s thumbnails for the three hundred photos!!!

Continue reading “Welcome to the Neighbourhood Recap of Awesome Psychogeographic Exploration!!!”

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Anne Percoco’s “Indra’s Cloud”

Anne Percoco's "Indra's Cloud"

Since we do have “access” to a fairly large river–one which separates us from Detroit, Michigan–a project such as Anne Percoco‘s “Indra’s Cloud” could work to highlight similar pollution issues in our area. Our river is not generally used for bathing, but the one pictured has been used for years and is now raising serious health concerns. Anne’s commentary on the issue came in the form of a raft consructed from used plastic bottles and bound with recycled labels, which were used as rope.

In her words, “I created a mobile public sculpture which brings to life a local myth and draws attention to the severely polluted condition of the Yamuna River.”

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Conflux City – Algorithmic Subway Adventure in New York City

BCL confluxcity

Back in July, Broken City Lab sent out a proposal to Conflux City 2009, which is a subset of the New York City festival for contemporary psychogeography, Conflux Festival. In August we found out that we were not only accepted into the festival, but we are also one of the featured projects of the program!

For the Conflux City 2009 program, we will be conducting psychogeographical urban research on the experiences of everyday life on the subways in New York through the activation of New York field agents. We will enlist the participation of numerous New Yorkers and visitors to the city to travel the subways and interact with their surroundings using a computer-generated algorithm that we create. This highly concentrated activity of paying attention to and disrupting the everyday on the New York subways will allow us to examine urban interactions in a well-functioning city.

In detail, participants are asked to bring their digital cameras to the walk. If they do not own a digital camera, the participants are still able to participate in the walk because we will be separating the field agents into groups, assuring there is at least one camera per section. We will provide the participants with a list of 25 randomly assembled steps in algorithmic form, and they will have a 2-hour timeslot with which to complete each of the 25 steps. We ask any one who is interested in our Algorithmic Subway Adventure to meet us at noon on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at Union Square Station.

Photographs from the Algorithmic Subway Adventures will allow us to visually review what it means to participate in personal and community engagement in a city that we imagine being the epitome of social urban functionality. Our interest in New York as a site of this research is situated in the city’s distinct difference to our city, where the scale of urban adventure and research is not only incredibly larger, but also occurring within an entirely different context, one that is critical for us to understand in our ongoing research.

confluxcity_logo

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Projector Tests: Day 2 of 2

IMG_9933

We met to do another round of projection tests, this time outside. While we still only had two projectors to work with for the test, we definitely verified an increase in brightness on outdoor surfaces (both with ambient light and without), though this increase is not equal to the amount of light we’re throwing at it—that is, shining two projectors with the same images at the same point does not double the brightness.

Continue reading “Projector Tests: Day 2 of 2”

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Projector Tests: Day 1 of 2

two projectors

We’re doing some projector tests this weekend in the hopes that many small-power projectors might add up to something bright enough to pull off what we need.

more brightness

This is two projectors, definitely brighter than one. Does anyone have an extra projector we could play with this weekend? If you do, please email us!

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Bureau for Open Culture: DESCENT TO REVOLUTION

Audible Dwelling by Learning Site

Descent to Revolution, and exhibition / residency created by the Bureau for Open Culture, features five international artist collectives and collaboratives that use urban spaces and social spheres as means of production and inspiration. During the course of the exhibition, participating artists visit Columbus in a series of residencies to make projects specific to the city. The work does not take place inside the space of the gallery but in concert with community and physical mediums outside of it.

Contributing to the exhibition is Claire Fontaine, Learning Site, Red76, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, and Tercerunquinto, and all will be working within some relation of the city of Columbus and its community.

Pictured above is Audible Dwelling by Learning Site, a combination loudspeaker and dwelling that responds, in part, to the proliferation of abandoned malls, parking lots, and housing in downtown Columbus. Audible Dwelling is situated in a parking lot on CCAD’s campus. During their dates of residency visitors follow the arrows on the floor out the gallery door to visit Audible Dwelling, to experience it by listening and by leaving a story that is eventually projected into public space via loudspeaker.

Will there by time for a road trip to Columbus???

This project is really exciting to see for a number of reasons, maybe the top one being that it’s nearly exactly what I wish we could do… I wish we had the money to do something as large-scale as this, or even money just to pay for materials for projects we’d like to realize through a program like this. For now though, our Micro-Residency project is getting some great submissions, and hopefully we’ll be kicking it off in the next few weeks, and doing a bunch of amazing things for free.

[via Art&Education mailing list]

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Juxtaposing Windsor’s Auto Plants with Toronto’s Streets

chyrslervstoronto

Consider this required reading: over at Spacing.ca, Shawn Micallef wrote about one his more recent trips to his former hometown, Windsor. Driving down Walker Road again after spending much of his time in Toronto walking, a lot, made him realize just how staggeringly huge these auto plants are, and he questions what we’re all wondering—what will happen when these plants entirely shut down?

Go, read it.

Thanks for passing this along, Rod.

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Projection Site for Another Project?

FAMFEST09-sm

I’ve been meaning to take a look at this location for a potential projection project that we’re looking into for Harvesting the F.A.M. The wall is dark brick, but we need to work out the logistics of projecting onto such a surface anyways for another project we’re working towards.

What exactly we’ll be projecting is still up the air, but we plan to be on the roof of Empire Lounge for an hour or so on one of the nights of the F.A.M. Fest. We’ll keep you posted.

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Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Garden

Patrick Blanc's Vertical Garden

Projects such as this Vertical Garden seem to be easier and easier to find, which hopefully means that they are becoming realized more often and in more locations. This particular project is a vertical collection of plant life that Patrick Blanc recently completed on a corner of the Athenaeum Hotel in London, England.

According to the project summary located on the hotel’s website, “It’s a fairytale dream of a wall, erupting with trailing tendrils and flowers eight storeys high above Piccadilly’s red buses like a living tapestry. As well as hosting native plants and flowers, way down below beside our Garden Room there’s the world’s biggest collection of non-nettly-looking nettles – or Urticaccae… This humid microclimate is the perfect spot for the more exotic species.”