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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back at the end of March, we went on an Algorithmic Walk with some brave folks (who not only trusted in our custom software generated algorithm, but also ignored the weather). I had previously posted a link to where you could find a custom-assembled algorithm, should you be curious to try it on your own, but I also wanted to post the code, in case anyone has any need for generating  a randomly assembled text.

So, after the jump, there’s the PHP code for those interested. I’ve tried to make helpful comments throughout, and the text is sized to fit on an 8.5 x 11″ page if you want to print it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, on an incredibly cold, rainy, snowy evening, we headed out on an exploration of Windsor’s downtown guided by a randomly assembled algorithm for Scavenge The City. We only made it through the first 20 steps (we stopped checking them off though), plus a couple others we skipped to by the end, but for the two or three hours we were out, it was great to experience the city with new people in new ways.

To see the algorithm, you can view it randomly assembled, refresh it to see a new order.

Read the rest of this entry »

SCAVENGE THE CITY: An Algorithmic Walk with Broken City Lab is happening on Sunday, March 29th at 6pm. Starting at Phog Lounge, we’ll be handing out a custom algorithm (a set of instructions), using a fancy computer program that we write, to take you and whomever you want to walk with, around the downtownish area of Windsor to discover, uncover, note, photograph, and invent. 

This isn’t a traditional scavenger hunt—we won’t be placing anything around the city for you to find—instead, the instructions will ask you to do specific things in less specific places, to try to encourage not just experiencing new places, but experience them in new ways.

The walk should wrap up by 10pm and then back at Phog we’ll share stories, videos, photographs, drawings, etc, of our adventures. Whether you’ve already come out to one of the previous hugely successful walking themed events in Windsor (Big Walk, or the Spacing Walk) or haven’t taken a stroll downtown in years, we would love to have you share on this adventure with us!!!

Last Thursday in Lee Rodney’s Border Culture class, we went out on an algorithmic walk to explore Wyandotte from Glengarry to Gladstone. The students were given the algorithm and map I made that you see above, but with varying order, and then sent out. As the goal was to have the students become familiar with the many grocery stores, restaurants, and commercial / architectural / commercial peculiarities of the area, the algorithm was based around specific instructions to guide them to pay closer attention to details through photographing, sketching, and noting, rather than an algorithm to guide them down different streets. 

I think the walk (and algorithm) went over pretty well. We’ll be looking at all the students documentation and hearing about their adventures this week in class (some students have already started posting on the Border Culture blog), but I think something like this on a larger scale would be another great addition to the ongoing walking series that have been led or initiated by Tom Lucier over the last few months. We’ve spoken about this before, but now we just need to set a date.