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Open Engagement, Group Work: The Collective Impetus

Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?”

We’ll be speaking on the panel, Group Work: The Collective Impetus, along with folks from National Bitter Melon Council, InCUBATE, and students from OTIS’s Public Practice program.

This trip is going to incredible for a few reasons (including getting to see the city of Portland, in all of it’s functionality), but perhaps more importantly, we’re going to be able to speak to a lot of people who are engaged in a practice that is at least slightly aligned to what we do here in BCL. It’s more often the case that we go to a conference as some of the only artists in attendance (an interesting position to be in, but always a little lonely).

There’s so many conversations we want to have, the 3 days we’re actually there likely won’t be enough.

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Expect More Activity + How Do You Collaborate Online?

Be it resolved that we’ll be a lot more active on here starting now.

We’ve been overly involved in communicating on Google Wave while trying to keep our brains together for Save the City. With that project winding down, we’ll be shifting more of our research and communications back on here. We’ve missed it.

And Josh said it best when he suggested that we should’ve been using the blog instead of Google Wave the entire time. He’s completely right.

Using that fancy collaborative tool that Google seemed to suggest would be the future of email never really fit into our work flow all that well, but it seemed the most convenient for having notes and research in one place. At first, maybe kidding ourselves, we thought it would do away with multiple emails back and forth, but then we kept forgetting to check our waves, so then we opted-in to receive emails when a Wave had been updated, and so it became really no better than a bunch of emails and some Google documents.

We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. We seem to lose so much in translation from discussions to the next time we meet up or begin working on something new. Should we be saving Word documents to Dropbox? I know Cristina and I have been using it to pass photos back and forth and its fairly convenient, though we haven’t tried working on the documents from there — I suppose we’re using it as a glorified FTP. Google Docs kind of works, but is somewhat annoying to have documents in two places (as I don’t think anyone is really truly committing to the cloud yet). What do you use when you’re working on something with someone else? How do you resolve multiple files with the same names?

With our goal (really this time) of trying to put together some kind of publication soon(ish), what’s going to be the best way to keep ourselves on the same page, or at the very least, merge everything together at the very end?

Any regular readers — what’s your method(s) for collaborating online? BCL, any suggestions for how we should move forward with this?

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How to Save a City

The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor.

For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events in the Broken City Lab: Save the City series, or perhaps you’ve just read about it here, or maybe you’ve meant to come, but you haven’t been able to fit it into your schedule — in an case, this is going to be our final event as part of the project, and you should come.

The things that we’ve learned from working with the community on creating audio documentaries, city-wide maps, sidewalk-parades, and postcards with hand-written letters have changed the way we think about this city, its past, and its future.

So, we would like to cordially invite you to the final part of Save the City on May 21st at the Art Gallery of Windsor. We’ll be in or around the building depending on the weather, but either way, we promise we won’t be hard to find. We would like you to come out to share with us one more time some of the things that shape the way you think about Windsor — we’ll talk about what we’ve learned, we’ll ask you a bunch of questions, we’ll show you hundreds of photographs, and then we’ll ask you to help us come up with a message that we’ll then put up on a billboard (or two) somewhere in Windsor. We’re hoping that this message can say something to the city that needs to be said.

Hope you can make it.

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

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XBees + Arduino

Although it’s been a while since I last worked on this project, things are continuing to move along. I finally assembled the Ladyada XBee adapters and successfully passed a message between the two XBees.

So, I’m not the best solderer and the first adapter I worked on suffered from an overusing tip on my soldering iron, which made heating up the solder with the tip of the iron next to impossible. There were also some issues (that remain unresolved) in terms of configuring the XBees, but thankfully that step seems to be unnecessary (at this point anyways).

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