Another iteration of our Text On Ice series, this time spelling out, “Let’s Be Friends” and mounted on a fence bordering the Forster Secondary School’s field.

Danielle and I made quick work, though as usual, our fingers froze long before we finished.

It would have been easier to have someone else on the other side of the fence, trying to pass monofilament line that’s wanting to curl up is difficult, especially in the cold.

I’m happy with how this one turned out, though now I want to start thinking about 1 letter per block. We’ll need many freezers. I’ll post some notes and photos on the process soon.

Using found plexiglass, PVC, and other found materials, Truth has put up a number of installations around Poland, most recently in places outside of cities. His earlier work is more geometric, often cubes, and small squares coming out of buildings; little additions to the architecture where he tests the public’s perception of a known space.

I saw this work by Andy Uprock, while trying to search out some more info on EINE. While I really detest this “cuprocking” terminology under which Uprock has framed this style of street art, I thought it would be a good example to note for our fence-text project.

COLAB is an interdisciplinary program run out of Syracuse University that pushes students to learn how to approach problems collaboratively and share multiple perspectives while working toward creative solutions. Their website is still coming together, the few posts on there are mostly videos / slideshows showing students working on various projects, but it looks like some really interesting things could come out of it.

The thing that caught my eye was this charrette competition, which partnered students from various disciplines over a weekend to come up with ideas and visions for the revitalization of a core downtown area. The competition was sponsored by the Syracuse Chamber of Commerce, and some students will stay on with the Chamber to continue in the planning of moving forward with some of the proposed changes.

Not that I necessarily want to get into this discussion, but I might bring up the University of Windsor’s logo at this point. Rumours put the price tag of this gem at around $1 million (which I’m sure includes the surrounding “branding” program). The majority of reactions to the logo, as I’ve heard them, begs the question—why not engage students in the design process, or ask them to design it, period? Why wouldn’t this University (or even the city) ask for students to contribute on a regular basis to (at the very least) reimagining, well, everything? How is anything in this city going to be pushed forward if planning is continually done behind closed doors, without the input of the real stakeholders? For now, it likely won’t. 

At any rate, it’s alright that no one is asking, because in reality this just gives us more to work with.

After a short holiday recess, we are starting Broken City Lab office hours again on Tuesday, January 6th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. Feel free to drop by to contribute, engage, ask questions, and fix this city. We’ll be doing some catch up from the break and then working on planning some upcoming projects and events.

I’ve found a group of individuals who have been creating some absolutely amazing work bordering on sound and technology called Intermod Series.  I may post a few of their works as I feel many of them are extremely interesting.  This particular project consists of a sound transmitting device and is called Project Citizens Band.

“This project was a month long broadcast over CB radio using prerecorded sounds designed to be mood altering. Four different audio tracks corresponded to common emotions experienced at the scheduled time of day. These were transmitted for a 5-minute duration, creating a sedative or stimulating affect.”

I got the needed resistors right before Christmas, though hadn’t had a chance to post this yet. As you can see, there’s a 270Ω resistor, a 9V battery, and a 10mm LED working… along with the resistors, I got a 9V power supply, so we can make signs and run them off the wall, rather than relying on a ton of batteries. As I’m unsure about just how long a whole bunch of LEDs could run on battery, I suppose depending on the size of the batteries this could vary… connecting a bunch of D batteries to add up to 9V will certainly last longer than one of these alone.

We’ll get started on this soon.

I just got back from out of town, I’m exhausted, having spent the last few days in northern Michigan (I forgot what it’s like to have real winter, it was nice). I pulled this out of the freezer, having nearly forgotten I had finished it, I had some difficulty freezing this one, mostly because I was trying to do so outside right when things were beginning to thaw.

I’m really looking forward to 2009—so many things to do and many more ideas to come. Posts should start up regularly again in the next day or so.

Tomorrow night, December 28th, at 8pm, Spacing Magazine’s Shawn Micallef  (in conjunction with Scaledown.ca and InternationalMetropolis.com) will be hosting a Psychogeographic Walk through Windsor. The walk will start and end at Phog and will consist of a simple algorithm to get people moving through the city. After everyone comes back, the routes will get mapped, highlighting discovered details and personal landmarks. 

For more information and to hear the PSA running on CJAM, check out the post on ScaleDown.

PS. The image above has nothing to do with Windsor or psychogeography, but is a still from a Pedestrian Scramble time-lapse video made by Sam Javanrouh that I saw (and liked) on Spacing Magazine’s website.

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks developing this project, and somehow waited until the coldest night yet to install the first successful Text On Ice (You Changed Everything) project. I’ll post some more details on the (ongoing) process later this week, but wanted to get this image up first.

This first iteration of the project is mounted via monofilament line, basically just tied to the fence. The plan is to embed the line into the ice on future versions of the project. The text will also change from work to work. 

Considering how cold it is this year in Windsor, it’s actually a good time to do this project, as it likely won’t melt for a while.

Installation shot.

Fairly legible from the sidewalk, though the next iterations of it will likely have larger text.