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Micro-Residency #1: CreateHere.org

CreateHere

“CreateHere works with one guiding principle in mind: we love our city for what it is, has been and could become.”

The non-profit organization started in 2007 and does things like provide over $300,000 in artists grants to area creatives, connecting talented artists to homes in Chattanooga, and asking everyone in their city what they want for their city.

They also work closely with small businesses in the city on a variety of initiatives, including providing 8-week business planning courses, access to expert advice, and offering peer roundtable discussions once a month. And they do things like the 48Hour Launch (48HL), which unites creative individuals to launch start-up businesses in two days.

They do this based on the responses they get from handing out 25,000 surveys to the community.

They were also recently included in The GOOD 100.

And a few of the Fellows from CreateHere are coming to Windsor (via Detroit) for one day this week (Tuesday, November 10th) to share, brainstorm, discuss, and in all likelihood, inspire (us).

This is going to be our first Micro-Residency and we’re not exactly sure yet what we’ll do for the day, but surely we’ll be touring the city, making many introductions, and figuring out how exactly they’ve been able to do what they have in just two years, and how a similar model of activity might work in Windsor. It’s going to be incredible, stay tuned.

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AMPHIBIOUS ARCHITECTURE

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A project by xClinic Environmental Health Clinic at NYU and the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, AMPHIBIOUS ARCHITECTURE attempts to generate a new dialogue between the environment and us.

The description, quoted from the site, since it’s more clear than my attempt at synthesizing the information would be:

“Installed at two sites along the East and the Bronx Rivers in New York, the project is a network of floating interactive buoys housing a range of sensors below water and an array of LEDs above water. The sensors monitor water quality, the presence of fish, and human interest in the river’s ecosystem, while the lights respond to the sensors, creating feedback loops between humans, fish in their shared environment.

Additionally an SMS interface allows homo-citizens to text-message the fish and receive real-time information about the river, contributing towards the collective display of human interest in the aquatic environment. The aim of which is to simultaneously spark a larger public interest and dialogue about our local waterways.”

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These are the sensors lit up before being installed in the river. To see some video of the sensors actually installed and floating, you’ll have to check out the site’s landing page.

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This is an image of some of the sensors lit up, being activated by passing fish, water conditions, and text messages. It’s an amazing cool project, especially given our proximity and recent interest in imagining some kind of Detroit River based project.

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Yochai Matos: Fluorescent Installations

Here’s a really beautiful work, Eclipse done with fluorescent lights by the Israeli artist, Yochai Matos. Along with light installations, he also does some interesting street art that deal with highlighting perspective, glitter, and 8-bit aesthetics.

I know when we were up in Peterborough, I had wanted to work with fluorescent lights, but from the little research I did, it seemed prohibitively expensive. Does anyone have any insight they could share on how one might work with these lights in this way, maybe specifically—does each light need a ballast, or is there a way of wiring in parallel that can get around that?

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And another work, Flame (Gate).

[via today & tomorrow]

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Attention Les Francophones de Windsor!

Le programme Panorama au station TFO a fait une série de reportages spéciaux sur l’industrie d’automobile et la crise économique de la ville de Windsor.  La journaliste Mélanie Routhier Boudreau a visité Broken City Lab pour filmer l’événement Welcome To The Neighbourhood et conduire une intervue avec moi.

The televison news show Panorama on the TFO network did a series of special reports on the auto industry and economic crisis in Windsor. Journalist Mélanie Routhier Boudreau visited Broken City Lab to interview me and film our event Welcome To The Neighbourhood.

Voici les 3 émissions Spécial Windsor de Panorama via le site-web de TFO:

Here are the 3 episodes of Panorama via the TFO website:

Celui-ci est à propos de l’industrie automotive et la manque emplois:

This episode focuses on auto-worker’s job loss:

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Cet émission est à propos de la Place Concorde:

This one is about the french community centre Place Corcorde:

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Nous nous trouvons dans le dernier émission, de l’espoir pour Windsor:

We are featured in the last episode, a hope for Windsor:

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The Artist, The Good Neighbour

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Theaster Gates is an artist, an activist, a community instigator and organizer, a repairman, a homeowner, and a believer in the importance of a neighbourhood. His art practice, which sits somewhere between and amongst all of those titles all at once has led to him buying an old candy store in Chicago’s South Side and beginning to renovate it into a home and a cultural anchor.

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At the corner of 69th and Dorchester, Gates’ home / workspace became a hub for neighbourhood activity. He says that, “As the neighbors grew more interested, I decided to allow them to assist, when possible and have given classes, workshops, public dinners and even exhibitions in the space. Dorchester has been an informal lab for social and community experiment.”

His decision to stay and work in his city has become a catalyst for other activity, and a reason for other people to stay as well. So, I can’t help but feel that we probably need to find even more ways to turn the BCL HQ into a hub of even more activity before something else in the balance collapses and we lose the space. Maybe we need to have weekly sleepovers?

[via Art21]

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100 Ways to Save the City in PDF

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Something I meant to do a while ago, but I’m doing it now… I’ve uploaded the list of 100 ways we suggested to save the city. The list ranges from the entirely possible to completely imagined, but each one might just make this city a better place, or at least make you feel a little bit better about this city.

There’s a different background colour for each of the 100 ideas, each of which was taken from a Google Map of Windsor. The colour didn’t show up so well in our projection, but it was there.

We’ll also upload the little Max patch we wrote to do the performance … it’s quite easy to use, but maybe would eventually be better to be something written in Processing?

Download the PDF for your enjoyment.