Direct Hit is one of the many inflatable streetart works by FilthyLuker. Lots of work dealing with trees with eyes, bananas, and tentacles.
Direct Hit
BCL Report, Post-Dance Party
Although the Dance Party was technically supposed to be a Parking Lot Party, the rain forecast and the subsequent move inside the gallery didn’t stop the awesomeness from happening!!! We have to extend a huge thank you to the following people and places: the School of Visual Arts for letting us throw down, Sandeep Soor, Jason Child, Justin James, Matt Herdman, Stephen Surlin, Cristina Naccarato for the Super Nintendo cable, the Blatherwicks for the mint leaves, Bob Soulliere at Cardinal Music (519-966-6400) for the audio equipment, Meaghan for helping with tea, and Chelsea for Christmas lights/dancing up a storm!
Incredibly fun night overall, and hopefully just the first of many dance-related events in the future. Continue reading “BCL Report, Post-Dance Party”
Seed Bomb Demo!!!
Broken City Lab held its first public demo today—we showed incoming visual arts students how to make seedbombs! Here’s our recipe: 1 part seeds, 1 part clay, 1 part coffee grounds, 8 parts soil, 1 part water.
Gapminder: Free Data + Building Understanding
I watched a TED talk sometime over the summer by Hans Roslings, in which he talked about data visualization, specifically using Gapminder. The website, Gapminder World is powered by Trendalyzer, and “enables you to explore the changing world from your own computer.” Perhaps most interesting is that the software allows you to see changes over time, seeing the way things change and the ways in which those changes are interrelated. If you visit the site, make sure to press the play button below the graph before you do anything else—it really helps to understand the possibilities of the software.
I’m very interested in trying to imagine what it would do, in terms of change, if we did have a better understanding of the way in which we and our actions are interconnected to other people and situations across the world and 20 years from now. Are graphs with moving the circles the best way to do this? I’m not sure, but I think the idea behind the tool is incredibly important.
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Tea Time
We spent quite a while this evening trying to perfect our tea recipe and then brewing almost 20 litres of it, in preparation of the upcoming Dance Party. In the photo above, we were in the middle of trying to figure out the best way to funnel the pots of tea into our reused (and cleaned) 2 litre bottles. We settled on transferring from the pot to another container with a lip on it, which made it infinitely easier to get the tea into the 2 litres, and gave us the opportunity to do some straining in between. We’ll post our recipe for the tea soon. We also re-evaluated our previous origami attempts and came up with a better solution, in time for our Wednesday Seedbomb demo.
BCL Report – August 29, 2008
The last Friday we had before the upcoming Dance Party and Seedbomb Demo… We now have flyers, seedbomb containers, seedbomb germination (in the wild), and tea container labels.
Toronto Pedestrian Scramble
On a pretty regular basis, I have to cross our infamous Huron Church Road intersection at College Avenue in order to get to LeBel. If I’m lucky, I’m coming from the West, and only have to cross College. However, there are many times that I have to cross Huron Church itself, fighting the timer (what is it, about 15 seconds?) and drivers making left-hand turns.
In Toronto, they unveiled a new set of pedestrian crossing signals, setup to create a crossing time of 57 seconds and an opportunity to cross in any direction (including diagonally). This change is happening at Yonge and Dundas and is being billed as one of Toronto’s initiatives to make the city more pedestrian-focused. While there are likely problems with this (traffic rerouting itself, many idling cars), I would welcome a change like this in Windsor.
That our city is clearly built around cars is one huge example of just how broken it is. Public transit here is rough (1/2 hour waits for buses after 6pm?), and I give anyone who bicycles on any major street a lot of credit, but how do we begin to look at a problem like the layout of a city on our terms and at our scale?
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We Have Germination!
After taking a few seedbombs home with me yesterday, I’m happy to report that with some considerable watering, our second recipe seedbombs have started to germinate. Also, and maybe even more exciting, the test seedbombs in Michelle’s yard have also began to sprout! Michelle also suggested we should make some photocopy handouts with the recipe on it to give out to people at the demo… hoping Josh has that recipe?… or was it in Michelle’s sketchbook…?
Jessica Banks and Ayah Bdeir: Open Source Snobs
Short video from a talk by Jessica Banks & Ayah Bdeir from the MIND08 Symposium (part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MOMA and co-presented by SEED Magazine). Both Banks and Bdeir are former MIT students and research fellows at Eyebeam’s R&D Open Lab. They talk about the concept of opensource design, and what it could mean for both designers and end-users. Over the 16 minutes, they briefly go over some history of opensource software, their ideas and products (which are pretty incredible), and the potential for the future to be patent-free.
BCL Report – August 22, 2008
I’m not sure why we didn’t start doing this earlier, but here’s the first report of our weekly activities. We’ve been meeting on Fridays for almost half the summer, trying to make, plan, and do events/projects/demos/awesome. Today involved us revisiting our seed bomb recipe, beginning the stenciling for posters for our upcoming Dance Party (details soon), and plotting our next adventures.