By Justin on February 27th, 2010, 1:10 pm 0 Comments

Not that we don’t already have our hands full, but seeing as it’s nearly March, we’re starting to look ahead to summer time activities. These activities might be somewhat related to this ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the blog.

We’ll be posting more information soon, but for now, just know that if you’ve been planning on visiting Windsor, you should try to keep your calendars open in July.

And, hope to see you SUNDAY, February 28th – 1pm at 362 California!

Tagged: BCL design inDesign plans poster projects research summer Windsor

By Justin on February 26th, 2010, 7:29 pm 0 Comments

The epic adventure with Arduino, LCDs, and PHP continues. I’ve finally made some progress in terms of breaking up the words and lines appropriately. It felt like a huge achievement, since I had been trying to figure out this line-break thing for quite a while.

You can check the majority of the progress in the video below, and all of the steps along the way are below! Don’t mind the nonsensical example texts. So first off, I figured out I needed to send Arduino very specific information to know where to line break.

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Tagged: arduino BCL LCD PHP research text

By Cristina on February 25th, 2010, 12:34 am 5 Comments

Day two of Create Here’s City Share Conference was just as busy as the first, but we got tons of work accomplished, and we were even able to take a short tour of the city at lunch!

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Tagged: Chattanooga city share conference create here tennessee

By Cristina on February 23rd, 2010, 9:30 am 0 Comments

Last Wednesday, Justin, Michelle, Josh and I flew from Detroit, MI to Atlanta, GA and drove another two hours to Chattanooga, TN for the City Share conference put on by our friends from Create Here!

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Tagged: Chattanooga city share conference create here windsor/detroit relationship

By Justin on February 22nd, 2010, 12:15 am 0 Comments

OurGoods, an online barter network, is running a pop-up storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That storefront is called Trade School and it’s a series of classes that centralizes the act of barter and exchange and a pop up classroom in New York City’s Lower East Side.

It works like this: “Take a class every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs.”

We’ve written about this idea of informal education opportunities and spaces before and it remains a kind of long-term hope to see something like this get started in the area.

So, consider this just another post on the ongoing list of inspirational activities that we’d love to imagine having the time to pull off here in Windsor.

[via Eyebeam & PSFK]

Tagged: collaboration community context education pedagogy school

By Justin on February 16th, 2010, 12:03 pm 1 Comments

We’re packing up and heading down to Chattanooga, Tennessee tomorrow to attend CreateHere’s City Share Mini Conference.

What the conference is all about:

“City Share is a conference for seeding innovative projects.We bring great minds from across disciplines together in Chattanooga, Tennessee to teach, share, plan, and change. The result? International knowledge-sharing; a growing network of change-makers; and organizations across the world better equipped to serve cities, for one, for all.”

We’re excited to catch up with our friends from CreateHere (who visited us back in November), and also to meet a ton of new people. I’m quite sure we’re going to be very inspired — just check out some of the other participants.

As we continue to work on our projects, our research, and our practice, it’s really great to continue to get to know other people who aren’t necessarily working as an arts collective, but are attempting to do some of the same things we are — namely, re-imagining creative activity in response to a place.

Tagged: BCL Chattanooga cities conference create here presentation research travel

By Justin on February 14th, 2010, 10:36 am 0 Comments

In a rather large-scale collaborative mapping project, artist Althea Thauberger and some of her colleagues are attempting to assemble an alternative tour guide, or rather, a (de)tour guide for visitors to Vancouver while the 2010 Olympic games are underway.

They set it up like this, “For us, it is vital to complicate the sanitized ‘best place on earth’ version of the city VANOC is officially promoting worldwide [...] Since Google maps will be the information source of choice to visitors, we are interested in using it as a tool to critically contextualize the city during this high-profile period.”

Exploring the map provides a wide variety of points of interest, some quite interesting, others less so. The map seems to provide the most engaging information when acting as guide to local activist history, with those markers providing some spatial context for what’s happened as a grassroots political level over the last number of years (though it would be interesting to see those in relation to current Olympic-occupied places). However, as a whole, the map is a bit too unfocused to provide any really useful or critical information (and perhaps as a disinformation campaign acting in opposition to the Olympics’ official maps and points of interest, it is most successful).

Conceptually, the goal of the project to reach the front pages of Google when one searches for things to do in Vancouver is quite intriguing — I can imagine that nearly all other information one might come into contact with while in the city during this time will be stamped as an official 2010 Olympics piece of merchandise — it may be that adding suggested routes for specifically-themed tours might be a way for providing some organizational structure for all of this information.

[via an email from Josh, who we met at the Propeller show]

Tagged: google maps olympics psychogeography tour Vancouver

By Justin on February 12th, 2010, 12:23 pm 0 Comments

For our upcoming Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event (a part of our ongoing Save the City project), we’ll be asking for your participation to help us come up with a list of those very things — the places around Windsor for which we need to apologize, and the places for which we can have hope.

After making these lists on February 28th, we’ll be heading out around the city to official recognize all of these sites with the help of two large ribbons, one of which you can see above.

The box arrived yesterday, the ribbons are amazing and huge. It’s going to be great.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Tagged: BCL official research ribbons Save the City

By Justin on February 10th, 2010, 9:39 am 0 Comments

My work on this ongoing LCD Arduino project has been continuing over the last couple of weeks, I just haven’t had the time to update appropriately.

So, I switched over my plan of attack from Processing to PHP. I figured this made sense for a couple reasons: first, I’m already very well-acquainted with PHP, I’ve written and hacked together a good amount of code in this language before and so I feel like I’ll spend a lot less time just figuring this out and more time actually doing; second, I don’t think I was really going to use Processing for its strengths, and instead, I was going to rely on its string functions, which pale in comparison to PHP.

I’ve made quite a lot of progress over the last week or so — all of which is detailed below. There are still some major problems I need to sort out, but for the most part things are about where I’d hoped them to be at this point.

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Tagged: arduino BCL diagrams electronics LCD numbers PHP research

By Justin on February 9th, 2010, 8:47 am 4 Comments

We’ve been waiting for this for a while, but Google Street View’s drive through Windsor is now up online and available.

Google’s tour took place in the midst of our 101 city workers strike, but too early into it to have (and thanks to the note from Steven) caught our Naturalized Area signs. At any rate, I’m looking forward to having the time to go through our city from seven months ago and explore.

It might also be a good way to start brainstorming for our upcoming Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event!

So, start exploring.

[via Rob's Twitter & windsoriteDOTca]

Tagged: google internet street view Windsor