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Mobile Mobile: Upcycled Phones Make Music

To cut a long story short, after a company-wide upgrade the agency had a lot of old mobiles gathering dust. Lost Boys International took these, built and hoisted a gigantic interactive chandelier/mobile that plays christmas jingles in their reception area.

When no one interacts with the sculpture, it plays “Carol of the Bells”. But you can also play with it. You can control it through this website or you can send a tweet with #lbitree and it will react to it.

Given some upcoming projects that we’re going to be tackling are going to be a bit more technology intensive, and in one instance is actually going to use cell phones (though not in this capacity), I thought I’d post it to add to the research archives. What’s really great is that LBI creative director, James Theophane, offers a quick breakdown of how the installation works, well worth a read to get an idea of some of the magic behind the installation. Also interesting is the Ning project site that was used by the folks making the installation as it happened in real-time.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Planning (in and) For the Future

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Monday night at BCL HQ, going over plans for moving forward on our recently OAC funded project starting in January 2010, Broken City Lab: Save the City (details to follow), using good ol’ fashioned lists and future technologies—it was amazing, in every sense of the word.

Not sure how many more times we’ll be meeting over the break, but we’re all excited for what the new year has in store … so many projects, it will be excellent!

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Michelle Wybenga’s Micro-Residency: Love Letters to the City

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Michelle Wybenga is asking people for love letters to Windsor.

As part of her ongoing micro-residency, she’s requesting from a number of people that she knows in the city for a contribution to an eventual publication of sorts containing these letters among many others.

She spent the weekend at BCL HQ working towards the beginnings of this project and we’re anxious to see it evolve.

Included below are her photos and notes from some of the conversations she had over the weekend.

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Mario Nanni’s “La Luce Della Musica”

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Mario Nanni‘s “La Luce Della Musica” is a visual and musical experience, projected onto the
façade of Milan’s opera Teatro Alla Scala.  Nanni used video projections and light to highlight
and compliment the architecture of Giuseppe Piermarini.  The precision of all of his projections are extremely impressive.  This project made me think back on our 100 Ways to Save the City projection, where we tossed around the idea of projecting animations before we decided on text based messages.

More images of this specific project under the cut, but here’s a video of something similar he did at Arco di Augusto in Rimini.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5vrP3BgC14

via designboom

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Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 6/6

Eric Boucher interviews Sam as part of his Micro-Residency

This past Saturday I did my portion of the BCL collab/micro-residency with the lovely and talented wunderkind, Mr.Eric Boucher.

For the collab I had Eric interview my sister’s good friend, Sam. Aside from her notable charm, I think Sam was a good candidate for the project because she is a student who came from Sarnia to study at the University of Windsor and could provide us with an honest “outsider” perspective. Under the supervision of Sam’s curious cat Joseph, she and Eric chatted about her first impressions of Windsor as well as the similarities and differences between the two border cities, Sarnia and Windsor.

What I found most interesting about the process was the organic way in which the conversation unfolded and continued to unfold after the camera was off between Sam, Eric, my sister and I(as I am sure was the case for the other interviews as well), which was a clear indication of the desire to participate (Windsorites and new windsorites alike) in the pro-Windsorian discourse……we love to talk about our underappreciated city!

I also think it is interesting to note that neither of us are native Windsorites (although my sis, Eric and I are county kids), we all had post secondary education as a common draw to the city, yet, I got the sense that we all seemed to feel like true Windsorites, ready to defend our city to the naysayers, the uninformed, the tresoners and the ones who lost hope.

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Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 5/5

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Yesterday, Eric Boucher met with my uncle, Lou Tortola, to interview him for his Micro Residency.  Lou immigrated to Windsor from Italy in the seventies, when he was about ten or eleven, and is now a successful entrepreneur, established writer, and CEO of eliquidMEDIA.  Over some espresso and biscotti, he talked with Eric about his first impressions of Windsor and Detroit as a child, and gave his perspective on the cultural aspects of the city. Because his line of work allows him to travel frequently to all sorts of places, he also discussed cities with similar qualities as Windsor and the lack of enthusiasm for home-grown talent.

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Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 4/5

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For part 4 of Eric Boucher’s Micro-Residency, we trekked all the way out to Harrow to interview my good friend, and local musician, Derek Harrison.  I met Derek way back in my first week of University and became friends very quickly.  Since that first semester in Windsor, Derek has been leaving Windsor left and right, moving to Ottawa, London, Montreal and even studying abroad in Lithuania, yet something keeps pulling him back to his roots, to Windsor.  I’ve always found Windsor’s handle on Derek interesting, so what better way to explore this then through a BCL interview!

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Math, Markers, and Measurements + Eric’s micro-documentary

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We spent last night watching a rough cut of some of Eric’s ongoing micro-residency project, did a lot of measuring, used Google Earth, did some math, drew some diagrams, and brainstormed a new project (because Cristina wants to sew, a lot).

With the semester basically over now, we’re hoping to wrap up a couple things before the new year before starting on some bigger new projects in the new year, which you will hear about soon!

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