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Windsor Airport: Slim Future

While researching different spaces for our Make This Better project, I’ve become more and more drawn to the Windsor Airport. This space has been so neglected that major talk for shutting it down is now on the table.

As of 2007, Serco Aviation Services Inc. terminated its contract regarding airport management from the City of Windsor because they’ve been losing money by being there. Now the City of Windsor operates the airport at an alarming deficit. I found all this information by simply typing “Windsor Airport” into Google for a brief history on it. Everything that came up was so negative and discouraging.

It seems, however, that the issue is more heavily connected with our next door neighbours.

With the Detroit Airport as a more internationally known landing area, Windsor Airport’s airspace is controlled from Detroit. This makes me wonder if having an airport in Windsor is even necessary? With the few that I’ve had the chance to discuss this with, their responses have been quite interesting, with the majority of them asking: “Where is the Windsor Airport?”.

Everything that I have been learning and researching about the airport in Windsor makes me feel like it would be a perfect site for Make This Better.

What do you guys think?

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New Friends Across the Border: Visiting 555

Yesterday, Lee Rodney (Research Director of the Border Bookmobile) and I headed on a short 4km journey.

We visited the fine folks at 555, a volunteer artist-run arts organization providing affordable studios and workspace, gallery space, exhibition programs, arts education programs, and an artist in residency program. We met at their temporary location, while they await the renovations of their new space down the road (the former 3rd police precinct). Those A and B markers in the map above — that’s how close their new building is to the School of Visual Arts.

We met with Monte, Erin, Elizabeth, and Carl, discussing possible collaborations in the not-so-distant future, as well as spending a good amount of time understanding why they do what they do. The scale and type of efforts are perhaps different than those of say, the Powerhouse Project, or the Imagination Station, but their decisions are based on some of the same ideals (and certainly with the same enthusiasm as our own), how do you build a climate of social, aesthetic and community-based investment here and now?

Their programming and artist residencies offer incredibly engaging opportunities for the community and visiting artists, and perhaps most compellingly, they focus on ensuring that “data” created in Detroit can also give back to Detroit.

We’ll be inviting them over soon, you’ll get to meet them and get inspired too, don’t worry.

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Janine Marchessault & the Leona Drive Project

Photo by wyliepoon.

A couple months ago I attended a talk hosted by Janine Marchessault on the Leona Drive project, which is a collaboration between The Public Access Collective and L.O.T. : Experiments in Urban Research (Collective).

Justin mentioned the Leona Drive Project back in 2009, but for a refresher: The Leona Drive project commissioned artist projects for a site specific exhibition in a series of six vacant bungalows slated for demolition by HYATT HOMES, a developer in Willowdale, Ontario (in the Yonge and Finch area of the GTA). The artists worked with a variety of media: audio, cell phones with GPS, architectural installation, projection, photography, sculpture and performance for a period of two weeks in the fall of 2009.

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Nicole Lavelle’s Lovely Projects: Be Okay + Neighbourhood Flags

Lovely text-based work. It’d be great to randomly run into this!!

As Nicole puts it:

This piece was an experiment in context, engagement and language. Uh, actually, what I mean is: I wanted people to see these phrases in interesting contexts and engage on an emotional level with the words I had chosen. This piece was also about my grandmother dying.

Materials: xerox, colored paper, thumbtacks, paper coffee cups, xerox transfer, manilla envelopes, cellophane bags, staples.

Nicole was also commissioned by GOOD to design a neighbourhood flag — great idea, right?!

Gorgeous work all-around. She’s also designing materials for Open Engagement 2011!!!

Spend some time checking out all her work — book design, typography, you know, making stuff and doing things. Very specific aesthetic choices, but fun reference for our (imaginary) future publications.

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Required Reading: A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible

A great downloaded book/PDF is available over at Half Letter Press. A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination presents a very accessible and readable overview and introduction to the history of art+activism based practices.

Well worth the half-hour or so that it will take to read through it.

The ending, which will particularly resonate with Danielle, I’m sure:

Creative resistance is not simply about designing glitzy visual stunts that the media will pick up on, it’s a lot more than that, it’s about making things that work, fashioning situations that both disrupt the mechanisms of power and show us our own power, our own potential to connect and create. The beauty is in its efficient use, and nothing is more beautiful than winning.

via Half Letter Press

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First Friday of 2011: Back in Action!!!

Our first Friday back was great. Unfortunately, Rosina couldn’t make it, but everyone else was around the table for the first time in almost a month. We’ve learned some things about how we work together over the last two and a half years, and we’re set to make more things happen this year than ever before.

There are some major production projects on our to-do list in 2011, but we’re also going to be undertaking a large research-based project in the first half of the year. So, to try to keep track of all of this activity, we’re going to be trying to shift more of our ongoing conversations onto our blog, likely filed under the Notes section. It’s going to act as our collective sketchbook, messaging system, and basically catch-all. Having tried Google Wave last year around this time, Google Docs, and plain old email, we’re hoping that this will keep things flowing back and forth between everyone at a much faster pace. Meeting all together for a two or three hours once a week makes it tough to get through much more than just figuring out what we should be doing.

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This Probably Isn’t Helping: When Gateways Fail

Physical civic improvements are an important step for Windsor. Our gateways, if you’re unfamiliar with the city, are a bit lack-luster at present. Where gateways do exist, the markers are underdeveloped, poorly executed, and are the kind of “this could literally be anywhere” design strategy.

Why do gateways matter? Physically and visually defining space is crucial to understanding where you are, and if gateways are to be the entrance to a city, they need to clearly enunciate where you are, and one might argue that this should denote a certain specificity. Failing at gateways means failing to define a space appropriately and in turn continuing to fail at getting over the “non-place” hump.

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Leddy Library adds American periodicals to electronic collection

Likely very helpful for some aspects of HFBC… wonder if there’s an equivalent to the Windsor Star for this kind of access.

Detroit Free Press, 1831-1922

The Detroit Free Press published its first edition before Michigan entered statehood and when wild animals outnumbered the people living in the city. Its editor assigned a writer to walk the waterfront and record the shipping news each day, creating the first news “beat.” The Free Press also was the first U.S. newspaper to print a regular Sunday edition and the first to publish court testimony.

via Daily News.

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A Visualization of Dream Theories

thoughts on dreams.

This is Traumgedanken, or Thoughts on Dreams, by German artist Maria Fischer. Fischer compiled 76 pages of various articles on dream theories and connected all similar ideas and key points together using coloured string, which continues to the end of the book. It’s a great way to visualize the information. I’d love a Psych textbook like this, please.

traumgedanken.

I found this on Colossal.