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.

Broken City Lab Projects

Below is a selective list of research, projects, workshops, installations, and interventions conducted by Broken City Lab with the most recent initiatives being at the top. This is just an overview, if you need more information, please see the blog archives or email us.

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Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation (2010)

For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place in need of new imagination. This project is made possible by the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, the Arts Council Windsor and Region, and Windsor Pride. (see more)

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Broken City Lab: Save the City (2010)

Over five months, the Save the City project will bring together emerging artists and city residents to imagine and prompt creative social engagements and civic activation. Within the project’s series of five activities, the content of each activity will be based on a creative interaction with a part of Windsor’s current and historical social, economic, and regional culture. This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council. (see more)

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Talking to Walls (2010)

As part of the Public Realm exhibition, curated by Christopher Hume at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto, we projected a series of fill-in-the-blank statements that examine the language and ideas surrounding public space, intervention, urban surfaces, and city infrastructures. (see more)

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Cross-Border Communication (2009)

For three nights in November, we projected a series of messages from Windsor that were visible across the border in Detroit, as an interventionist performance series based on the desperate need to communicate between these two cities. This project was made possible by the University of Windsor Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, and was designed with the Vincent Massey Secondary School Junior Physics Club. (see more)

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EXTENDED FIELD TRIP #001: PETERBOROUGH (2009)

For one week in October 2009, Broken City Lab researchers travelled to Artspace in Peterborough, Ontario to understand the city and its community. Through surveys, townhall meetings, informal discussions, photography, and video, we concluded that “Everything is OK” in Peterborough as of October 15, 2009. (see more)

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100 WAYS TO SAVE THE CITY (2009)

A projection performance that listed 100 Ways to Save the City—ranging from the obvious to the impossible. Situated on the roof of a local business and projecting onto the wall of an apartment building, we presented a list of our ideas for saving the city, followed by an open-submission of ideas from the street, our phones, and Twitter. (see more)

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Algorithmic Subway Adventures (2009)

As part of Conflux City 2009, we led an algorithmic adventure on New York City’s subways to generate psychogeographical urban research on the experiences and interactions in everyday life on public transit. This project was made possible by the University of Windsor Arts Society. (see more)

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WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD (2009)

Welcome to the Neighbourhood took almost 30 brave explorers on an algorithmic / psychogeographic adventure around West Windsor on a Monday night in order to highlight the potential to pay particular attention to the many things that usually go unnoticed in the normally highly transient neighbourhood. (see more)

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NATURALIZED AREA (2009)

These signs designed and installed near the end of the 101 day city worker strike in Windsor highlight one of the many wonderful accidental meadows, created by the ongoing city workers strike. These naturalized areas allow for a moment in which one might be able to mistakenly believe that Windsor is a progressive city, a place where this type of naturalization is encouraged for its beauty, for its potential to attract wildlife, and for the stories our landscape is capable of telling. (see more)

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A CONSULTANCY (2009)

Windsor is infamous for hiring consultants and creating feasibility reports that remain unused years after their release, so with an opportunity to utilize an old retail space in the core of the downtown, we generated an informal report on the potential uses for the numerous other vacant storefronts below a city-owned parking garage. (see more)

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MAGNETIC PLANTERS (2009)

Through a series of research initiatives, we created a magnetic planter—a simple interventionist tool to insert micro-gardens into new parts of the city created with fused plastic bags and rare-earth magnets. (see more)

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TEXT IN-TRANSIT (2009)

A collaborative project with Transit Windsor (the city’s public transit system) and the community at large, Text In-Transit involved the negotiation of space on buses normally reserved for advertising to become an exhibition of 100 short statements, poems, and stories generated from the community, meant to help change the conversation around Windsor. This project was funded by the University of Windsor’s Ontario Public Research Group, the University of Windsor’s Arts Society, and the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Committee. (see more)

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YOU ARE AMAZING (2009)

Installed above the EC Row, Windsor’s major expressway, using cheap orange flagging tape to weave into the fence of the pedestrian overpass, You Are Amazing stayed up for 24 hours, communicating to thousands of drivers, before being taken down by an unknown source. (see more)

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AN ALGORITHMIC WALK (2009)

An Algorithmic Walk, created to encourage an active interaction with Windsor’s downtown core, utilized a PHP script to generate a custom algorithm that guided participants through a series of activities, including the one pictured above, a race at night. (see more)

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REWRITING WINDSOR (2009)

As part of a community-based activity, Rewriting Windsor, a group of community members gathered to redraw, remap, rewrite, and re-imagine Windsor’s history—the first of a series of activities that will eventually be published with each participant as a collective author. (see more)

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MAKE THINGS HAPPEN (2009)

Research and design for a custom-made LED sign that reads, MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, created through an ongoing series of workshops where basic electronics soldering skills were learned and practiced. (see more)

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SAVE A CITY (2008)

Research on the potential for temporary messaging in the city led to the use of silicon bakeware and card stock to create a series of messages embedded in blocks of ice and mounted on and against fences throughout the city—above, the message “Save a City” is read while facing Detroit from Windsor’s riverfront. (see more)

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2009 STRATEGIC PLAN (2008)

To understand the city and our activity within it, we created a 48 square foot mind map of potential tactics to engage for the year 2009; many of the tactics led to a large idea of sending a message to Detroit, or more generally, furthering our investigation of the specifics that make Windsor the city it is. (see more)

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TETRIS TOURNAMENT (2008)

There was a 40″ LCD television in the hallways of the School of Visual Arts at the University of Windsor, placed in the location to run advertisements in exchange for free photocopying, but the ads never ran—instead, we hijacked the screen to have a Tetris tournament and screen a series of videos until it was taken down months later. (see more)

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NIGHT OF THE LIVING BROKEN CITY (2008)

In an effort to rethink the wasted use of public space on the University of Windsor campus, we borrowed power from the nearby Dramatic Arts building to engage in guerilla projection, screening Teenagers From Outer Space, a b-movie now in the public domain, and invited passersby to watch it with us. (see more)

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SEED BOMB DEMO (2008)

On the first day of school, we offered a simple workshop with first-year undergraduate students on making seed bombs, a basic guerilla gardening technique that utilizes soil, clay, coffee grounds, and wildflower seeds to propagate barren urban wastelands. (see more)

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