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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By Justin on November 19th, 2009, 12:32 am 3 Comments

Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon.

Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done projecting for the year (with the exception of one more upcoming project with the Border Bookmobile). However, we’re already imagining a continuation of the Cross-Border Communication project for next spring.

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Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 18th, 2009, 10:05 am 7 Comments

Last night was the second iteration of Cross-Border Communication where we sent a variety of messages from Windsor to Detroit. We started with “We’ve Missed You.”

We’ll be doing the final iteration of this suite of Cross-Border Communication tonight (Wednesday) around the usual time (8pm).

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Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message performance projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 17th, 2009, 1:47 pm 6 Comments

Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way.

This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.

With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.

Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.

Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.

Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 16th, 2009, 5:44 pm 2 Comments

Tonight, we are going to perform the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication.

Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we have the equipment we need to realize this project.

Cross-Border Communication was initially imagined through a collaborative effort between Broken City Lab and students from the Vincent Massey Secondary School Junior Physics Club in Windsor, Ontario. The project will attempt to hijack and transform communicative efforts between Windsor and Detroit, which has historically been based solely on economic exchange.

The projection will begin at approximately 8pm near the foot of Ouellette Avenue and Riverside Drive in Windsor and will run for approximately 30 minutes. The projection will be visible from Detroit and from the edge of Windsor’s waterfront.

Tagged: BCL campus Detroit projection research Windsor

By Justin on November 3rd, 2009, 3:48 pm 3 Comments

We spent yesterday evening out around town with our projector and new power inverter, testing sight-lines and potential backup locations for the Cross-Border Communication project.

We’re getting close to knowing exactly how and when we’ll get to do this project, and you can see our research and field tests after the jump.

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Tagged: battery BCL Detroit inverter projection research test university Windsor

By Justin on October 30th, 2009, 12:11 pm 0 Comments

Monday night was another huge brainstorming session with some new and old friends. We spent most of the evening trying to figure out the potentials in doing something like a floating sculpture in the Detroit River. We’ve discussed this before, and it seems that the space between what we’d really like to do and reality is quite large.

That’s part of the fun though, how do you generate some kind of communication across borders without alerting the authorities, or how do you manage the headaches of going through the proper channels?

At some point we headed down to the basement and looked at a kayak Rod made when he was in grade 8 (pictured above). We wondered if it could act as a potential substrate for one part of the project. Though we talked about projects like the Waterpod Project or Andrea Zittel’s Pocket Property Floating Island project, it became fairly clear that anything we could do in the short-term would need to involve a kind of very limited-duration kind of exchange between Windsor and Detroit.

We also talked about a kind of guided tours of neighbourhoods in Windsor and Detroit (and while these have already been happening), the difference here would be to exchange with a group of folks from Detroit, so that we give them a list or map to see parts of our city, while we get to head across for a neighbourhood level tour of places in Detroit!

Tagged: BCL boat border Detroit Detroit river floating sculpture Green Corridor kayak research Windsor

By Justin on October 6th, 2009, 9:48 pm 15 Comments

As part of FAM Fest 09, we did a projection performance on the roof of Metro Cleaners accessed from Empire Lounge in downtown Windsor.

For about an hour and a half, we presented our 100 Ways to Save the City and then asked for ideas from the folks on the ground, at Phog, and on the Twitterverse.

After the jump, there’s 160-something photos from all the ideas that were projected on Saturday night.

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By Justin on October 2nd, 2009, 2:07 pm 1 Comments

Saw a good deal on FutureShop’s website, thanks to Mike, and had to place the order. While this projector is still nowhere near bright enough for Cross-Border Communication, I couldn’t pass up a 2800 lumens projector on sale for half price.

It’ll debut tomorrow night at our projection performance for FAM Fest.

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By Justin on September 8th, 2009, 2:43 pm 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to take a look at this location for a potential projection project that we’re looking into for Harvesting the F.A.M. The wall is dark brick, but we need to work out the logistics of projecting onto such a surface anyways for another project we’re working towards.

What exactly we’ll be projecting is still up the air, but we plan to be on the roof of Empire Lounge for an hour or so on one of the nights of the F.A.M. Fest. We’ll keep you posted.

Tagged: 100 ways BCL mockup photoshop projection research test