…and then the city told itself the same old stories
For the first time in over 25 years McIntosh Gallery and Forest City Gallery have joined forces to bring the latest contemporary art to audiences in London and further afield. Together, the two galleries have published …and then the city told itself the same old stories by Broken City Lab. This publication documents our recent exhibit at [...]
Installing at Forest City Gallery
We spent the weekend in London, Ontario. We were installing for our upcoming exhibition at Forest City Gallery, while also briefly wondering about what it would be like to not do site specific work. Anyways, you should plan to come to the opening on September 9th! We’re working on an installation using our “…and then the city” [...]
ATTC Calgary: Unfolding the Cycles of a City on Billboards & in Print
On the final day of our ATTC Calgary residency, the billboards launched. We headed out in the early afternoon with Randy to document them all. Alongside highways, on the sides of buildings in the downtown core, and mixed in with other urban-fringe architecture. The billboards stood deeply embedded and clearly removed from the landscape, at [...]
ATTC Calgary Day 6: Mapping Calgarian Kindness
Wednesday morning we set up for our last day of Urban Discovery with Truck Contemporary Art‘s CAMPER, this time stationed in Central Memorial Park. The theme for the day was “Finding Urban Sophistication and Warm Western Hospitality.” What we wished to explore was the notion that Calgarians are on average a kinder population. We also were [...]
ATTC Calgary: Projecting New Narratives of a City
Our work on ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project continued with a couple day’s break from events, allowing to focus on planning the remainder of our residency activities and starting work on our publication. Tuesday night was our projection event around the edge of Central Memorial Park — an impeccably well-manicured green space in the middle [...]
ATTC Calgary Day 3 & 4: the Tales & Timelines of a City
On Day 3 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, it rained, and so we planned. We planned and discussed and reviewed some of the answers we had received from our activities on Day 2 — glimpses of the state of Calgary, from a ground-level perspective. For Day 4, we had to condense our planned events into [...]
ATTC Calgary Day 2: Stories of a Distanced City
On Day 2 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, our ongoing work finds us asking questions about a city that we’re still just getting to know. The questions are, necessarily, basic and straight forward. We’re not conducting deep sociological or statistical research, but rather trying to tease out a series of narratives that [...]
ATTC Calgary Day 1: Shortcuts for Urban Resistance & Algorithmic Walks
We’re in Calgary working with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, doing a residency based on our “…and then the city…” (ATTC) research. Developed after a six-month community research project back in Windsor called, Save the City, ATTC was initially realized as two billboards in Windsor and an accompanying publication that looked at the cyclical [...]
Urban Discovery in Calgary with Truck’s CAMPER
We’re in Calgary for 9 days as part of Truck Gallery’s CAMPER 2011 Urban Discovery Project. Here’s what’s going to be keeping us busy for the next week: July 21 (Thurs): CAMPER Day 1: Exploding Calgary (interviews & storytelling) (12pm-3pm) 222 8 Avenue SW July 22 (Fri): CAMPER Day 2: Spatial & Temporal Narratives of Calgary (public mapping) [...]
![Just unboxed our laser cut acrylic from Ponoko for a new project we’ll be working on over the summer. We started some really early brainstorming on this over six months ago, so it feels really great to finally be moving it forward. Above, the back of the piece of acrylic. The front, with the protecting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wpid18724-IMG_0058-150x150.jpg "Some Laser Cut Acrylic for New Project (unboxing)")
![I’ve made some really great progress on this ongoing Arduino + LCD project over the last couple of weeks — some of the two larger hurdles are now out of the way, the results of which you can see in the video above. Since the video was shot, I’ve improved the PHP script some more [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8202-150x150.jpg "Parsing RSS Feeds for the Arduino + LCD + PHP project")
![On Thursday night, on what was supposed to be a test run for projecting on the side of the Jackman Building (the new drama building at the University of Windsor), Broken City Lab ended up exploring a number of locations on campus armed with a projector, a laptop, and a really long extension cord. Originally, we [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Broken-City-Lab-is-on-the-wall-of-the-new-drama-building-at-the-University-of-Windsor-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – Oct 9, 2008")
![Courtesy of the always brilliant Steven … There’s now a new submission form that allows you to get a quick preview of what your Text In-Transit panel could look like, along with a fun little colour swatch. If you’ve already submitted, it’s worth submitting more just to try this out, and if you haven’t submitted yet—get [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/bcl_textintransit-submit-150x150.jpg "New Text In-Transit Submission Form!")
![We’ll be taking over 406 Pelissier from June 8th-28th and setting up a consultancy to research, investigate, and imagine alternative uses for the entire parking structure located at the corner of Park and Pelissier. Invented studies, statistics, and illustrations will be exhibited and will result in a formal report / action plan for future initiatives in [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/aconsultancy1-150x150.jpg "Broken City Lab: A Consultancy")
![We did it. With a lot of help, we plowed through the remaining eight letters, finishing the papier maché part of the process towards completing our ongoing large-cardboard letters project. On Friday night, we had ten people around the table, including our dear Cristina for a short while, and it was great!!! Next on the to-do list — get [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_40091-150x150.jpg "The Letters are Done Phase 2!!!")
![Starting on January 15, 2013, we’ll be offering a new workshop series for anyone and everyone interested in learning about electronics and physical computing. Hosted by Paul Anderson – a man of too many hobbies who holds the advanced qualification for ham radio in Canada, and has been working with electronics on and off since childhood [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BEDO-POSTER-150x150.jpg "New Workshop Series Starting in January: Building Electronics / Designing Originally")
![Monday night at BCL HQ, going over plans for moving forward on our recently OAC funded project starting in January 2010, Broken City Lab: Save the City (details to follow), using good ol’ fashioned lists and future technologies—it was amazing, in every sense of the word. Not sure how many more times we’ll be meeting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_13821-150x150.jpg "Planning (in and) For the Future")
![Day 3 of our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at Artspace was filled with design, math, and construction. Having decided that the general sense of the city is that “everything is OK,” we moved forward on printing posters and building some text that will be on display for the opening Friday night. We had many adventures [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_3631-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip Day 3: Construction")
![Last night’s Noiseborder event was a success. A number of people came down to Studio A in Lambton tower and helped us collaboratively rewrite Windsor’s history using maps, time lines, and story boards. All content was digitally remixed and projected on the screen with old photos and videos of Windsor. Justin started off the night by explaining [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/michellegc1-150x150.jpg "Smorgasborder 02: Rewriting Windsor")
![In order to keep things moving with Eric Boucher’s Micro-Residency project, I invited Eric to interview my oldest (in terms of age) friend Terry Marentette yesterday afternoon. I met Terry two years ago in an Art History class at the School of Visual Arts and was immediately astonished by his immense knowledge of Windsor’s past. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/042-150x150.jpg "Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 3/5")
![I sat down with a couple of different people over the last few weeks to discuss the possibility to rethink how we collectively address youth retention in Windsor. It’s an incredibly pressing (and yet somehow invisible) emergency. As a faculty member and collaborator with many recent graduates, it’s a professional and personal challenge to see [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_5190-150x150.jpg "A Proposal for Making It Easier to Stay Here: On Economic Development, Tax Policy, and Youth Retention")
![Monday night was another huge brainstorming session with some new and old friends. We spent most of the evening trying to figure out the potentials in doing something like a floating sculpture in the Detroit River. We’ve discussed this before, and it seems that the space between what we’d really like to do and reality [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_5441-150x150.jpg "Earlier This Week In the Basement of BCL HQ")
![We spent last night watching a rough cut of some of Eric’s ongoing micro-residency project, did a lot of measuring, used Google Earth, did some math, drew some diagrams, and brainstormed a new project (because Cristina wants to sew, a lot). With the semester basically over now, we’re hoping to wrap up a couple things [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_6230-150x150.jpg "Math, Markers, and Measurements + Eric’s micro-documentary")
![A few hours before we were set to do the 100 Ways to Save the City project, we decided we wanted to make it interactive in some way. I had gone ahead and put all of our ideas on how we might suggest saving the city into a nice Keynote presentation that we could easily [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/maxlivetext-screenshot-150x150.jpg "Interface for our Text Projection Tool")
![We are very pleased to announce the following artists in residence for our upcoming Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices project. These artists were selected from over 120 applicants and represent an incredibly diverse range of practices, interests, and backgrounds: Andrea Carvalho Montreal, QC Brennan Broome and Chloé Womack Portland, OR Brett Randall Jones & Jack Forinash Oakland/San Francisco, CA [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ArtistsInResidence-150x150.jpg "Artists-in-Residence Announced for Homework!")
![Here it is, or at least, here’s part of the physical archive, the scannable stuff anyways, from 2008-2009. It’s been hanging out in my filing cabinet for a long time, but finally with the help of Miranda Fay during her off-hours, it’s been gradually scanned in page by page. Archives are crucial for taking stock, for remembering, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2546-150x150.jpg "Keeping Track of the Archives")
![424 Pelissier was a fun space for kids to be creative all day on Sunday as part of Imagination Lab. Merry Ellen set up her baking station over in that space. Later Sunday night, I accompanied Laura to do some more installations. The kids had a lot fo fun interacting with each other and learning [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_0650-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 24: Imagination Lab & Disco Balls")