Hello. We're artists working through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city.
The Eco-House was bumpin’ Friday night! Amongst a slew of other undergoing projects, Michelle, Rosina, Josh and I we’re all hard at work, trying to get everything organized for our upcoming event and final installment of Save The City that’s taking place this Friday at the Art Gallery of Windsor!
Rosina and I tackled the Save The City Micro Tool-Kits that will also be distributed THIS Friday night. We did everything from editing the recipes, to creating a layout, to drawing little doodles, and we’re very excited to share them with you! While Rosina and I were busy working away on one end of the table, Josh and Michelle were just as busy on the other end organizing and creating a calendar and list of needs for all the SRSI participants.
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!
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!
Mario Nanni‘s “La Luce Della Musica” is a visual and musical experience, projected onto the
façade of Milan’s opera Teatro Alla Scala. Nanni used video projections and light to highlight
and compliment the architecture of Giuseppe Piermarini. The precision of all of his projections are extremely impressive. This project made me think back on our 100 Ways to Save the City projection, where we tossed around the idea of projecting animations before we decided on text based messages.
More images of this specific project under the cut, but here’s a video of something similar he did at Arco di Augusto in Rimini.
For part 4 of Eric Boucher’s Micro-Residency, we trekked all the way out to Harrow to interview my good friend, and local musician, Derek Harrison. I met Derek way back in my first week of University and became friends very quickly. Since that first semester in Windsor, Derek has been leaving Windsor left and right, moving to Ottawa, London, Montreal and even studying abroad in Lithuania, yet something keeps pulling him back to his roots, to Windsor. I’ve always found Windsor’s handle on Derek interesting, so what better way to explore this then through a BCL interview!
Day 3 of our New York excursion and finally the day we’ve been waiting patiently for…the day of our Algorithmic Subway Adventure for ConfluxCity! In case you need a recap, The Algorithmic Subway Adventure was our attempt to psychogeographically explore, and engage with passengers of the New York City subway system.
We woke up fairly early to make all of the necessary preparations, as well as mentally ready ourselves for an eventful day. Danielle and Justin wrote out and edited the list of algorithmic steps that we finalized the night before, while Michelle and I grabbed breakfast for the four of us. We headed over to Kinkos for some quick photocopies and then headed onto a Subway and made our way to Union Square Station.
In tandem with The Open Corridor and Drive-Through Symphony events, Green Corridor has also installed another exhibit, Open Community Video. This installation features videos from local students and community members. The videos are rear-projected through the front window of one of the The Green Corridor’s new Ecohouses located at 372 California Ave.
Open Community Video will take place Thursday (tonight!), September 24th from 8-10pm and Friday, September (tomorrow!) 25th from 8-10pm. If you have any short videos that you would like to contribute to this installment, just bring a dvd copy of it to the house tonight or tomorrow night!
We’re in New York for Conflux 2009 and we’re participating as part of Conflux City! We spent the first day catching up on some sleep, then venturing out into the city and touching base at Conflux HQ. There were a number of presentations we wanted to see, all of which helped us to start articulating some bigger questions we’ve been having about our own practice lately.
We’re scrambling right now to finish up our prep for our Algorithmic Subway Adventure at noon today (Sunday), so more details in the next posts later.
Back in July, Broken City Lab sent out a proposal to Conflux City 2009, which is a subset of the New York City festival for contemporary psychogeography, Conflux Festival. In August we found out that we were not only accepted into the festival, but we are also one of the featured projects of the program!
For the Conflux City 2009 program, we will be conducting psychogeographical urban research on the experiences of everyday life on the subways in New York through the activation of New York field agents. We will enlist the participation of numerous New Yorkers and visitors to the city to travel the subways and interact with their surroundings using a computer-generated algorithm that we create. This highly concentrated activity of paying attention to and disrupting the everyday on the New York subways will allow us to examine urban interactions in a well-functioning city.
In detail, participants are asked to bring their digital cameras to the walk. If they do not own a digital camera, the participants are still able to participate in the walk because we will be separating the field agents into groups, assuring there is at least one camera per section. We will provide the participants with a list of 25 randomly assembled steps in algorithmic form, and they will have a 2-hour timeslot with which to complete each of the 25 steps. We ask any one who is interested in our Algorithmic Subway Adventure to meet us at noon on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at Union Square Station.
Photographs from the Algorithmic Subway Adventures will allow us to visually review what it means to participate in personal and community engagement in a city that we imagine being the epitome of social urban functionality. Our interest in New York as a site of this research is situated in the city’s distinct difference to our city, where the scale of urban adventure and research is not only incredibly larger, but also occurring within an entirely different context, one that is critical for us to understand in our ongoing research.
Green Corridor’s ecohouse recently moved to 362-372 California from it’s original Sunset Ave. location, providing multiple new opportunities for research and community collaboration. Located in the 362 California house is a small office room that BCL has taken over!
We started moving in Thursday evening and had quite a bit of trouble maneuvering those two desks between the narrow halls and small door ways, but we made it happen! The room is quite bare right now, but our office space is sure to be decked out in no time. Next week we’ll start installing some bulletin boards, maybe a light fixture, and see where that takes us. We also have access to the basement which will be great for workshops and the like.
