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HFBC Book Ready for you to Explore (& get a copy for your collection!)

Remember a couple of weeks ago, we received some copies of our How to Forget the Border Completely book? Well, there were a couple of print issues that have now been resolved, so if you’ve been waiting to get your hands on a copy, now’s the time! HFBC was an 8-month research project that looked at the ways in which we might actually be able to forget about the border between Windsor and Detroit. Whether through small-scale micro-grants or large-scale infrastructure proposals, we imagined these two cities as one big community across 150 pages.

You can purchase the book through Blurb. It should arrive within a couple weeks tops. We’re going to get around to offering a soft cover version too, soon. In the meantime, you can also read through a PDF of the entire book (p.s. it’s 72mb). It’s probably not as fun as having a book in your hands, but the content is there for your perusal.

This book is actually phase 1 of a larger HFBC project — think airplanes, scale models, and a few other things that will take a lot longer to complete than we ever anticipated. For now though, we’re just really happy to see this in print!

 

 

 

 

 

 

BUY a copy!!!

How to Forget the Border Completely is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

 

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Homework Residency: Day 4, by chance

The report for Day 4 of our Homework Residency has arrived with photos and notes from the residents themselves. Be sure to check out more on our Artists-in-Residence.

This post marks the final instalment of documentation from our residency — at least in this form. There’s more ahead that you can anticipate from the Homework publication, videos of the conference presentations, and somehow, more. We’d like to again sincerely thank everyone who made Homework possible and for all the artists in residence for participating. Now without further adieu, here’s some reflections on the final day of the residency, which would be followed by Day 1 of our conference.

Continue reading “Homework Residency: Day 4, by chance”

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33 Questions Per Minute

In 2000,  Rafael Lozano- Hemmer messed around with some computer programs, lcd screens and a dictionary and created ’33 Questions Per Minute’, an installation featuring 21 lcd screens set up in various places and positions that generate unique and absurd questions thirty-three times per minute.  The text is sorted randomly together through a generator and appears on the screen just long enough for the viewer to read it, and a new one appears in time before anything can be pondered further. According to Hemmer’s website, the system would take up to 3,000 years for all randomized questions to be asked!

“This piece is loosely based on the long tradition of automatic poetry. It is full of anti-content. It attempts to underline our incapability to respond, faced with an electronic landscape made up of demands for attention. The piece provides useless and slightly frustrating machine irony. Tireless grammatical algorithms perform a romantic and futile attempt to pose questions that have never been asked.

The effect of the installation is destabilising due to its speed. The rhythm of questions excludes any rational answer. 33 questions a minute is the threshold of legibility : there is no time for reflection.”

 

As soon as I came across this, it reminded me of Justin’s work experimenting with arduinos a while back.