CARTographyTO hacks Astral info pillars
Via BlogTO… Several months in the making, CARTographyTO formed through word of mouth when the first Astral Media pillars were sunk into the sidewalk in Toronto: concerned citizens, artists and others with a creative streak came together with the desire to reclaim the lost public space in their neighbourhoods. A spokesperson for cARTographyTO stated, “These structures [...]
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 [...]
How We Spend Friday Nights: Planning, Writing, and Mapping
Meeting twice in a week can make such a difference in terms of how much we can get done. We’re still in the thick of planning for the first event of Save the City. We met earlier last week to go over the basics of finalizing our adjusted budget, put together the first round of [...]
Phone Calls and Budgets – Tuesday Morning Productivity Extravaganza
Tuesday felt like the first day back from the holidays should. We were tired, well Josh and I were tired, we were motivated and anxious to get to work, and we got a lot done. It was a very great way to start the new year! We spent the better part of the morning and [...]
![Over the weekend, I tested out different kinds of paint to use on this shower curtain-type material for an upcoming large banner project. First, I tried some heavy acrylic paint and spread it evenly three times in different thicknesses. The line with the most paint peeled easier, however, the line with the lightest coat did [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1-150x150.jpg "Preliminary Banner Tests- Paint on Plastic")
![Official Day 1 of SRSI kicked off, lots of new folks starting their projects, vinyl is up, rooms are painted (and almost done), floors are clean, the storefronts are open!!! Come see us. The day started off with a bit more painting and cleaning up of 410 Pelissier. As no one was moving in this [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/IMG_9860-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Official Day 1: Welcome Julie, Eric, Daragh, Andrea, Julie and Jefferson")
![I’m starting a new project in creating a series of iPhone applications for Surviving Windsor. Some of these applications will be absurd, some useful, but all will be focused primarily on the specific conditions and realities found here in South Detroit. This suite of applications takes the city as its conceptual backing, generating a set of small [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3934-150x150.jpg "iPhone app development (on paper)")
![I’ll be spending most of the week finishing up a couple lingering parts of Save the City: assembling the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope and putting the final touches on the edit from Listen to the City that Danielle assembled. The audio documentary is going to be an overview, or maybe [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/IMG_3075-150x150.jpg "Maps + Final Cut")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/img_8660-edit-150x150.jpg "Text On Ice")
![We made a lot of progress tonight, not only getting a considerable way through the first coat of red paint, but also testing a variety of techniques for applying the retroreflective glass beads! We also got to spend some time talking through how we’ll be temporarily installing the letters in a variety of spaces. We [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_4441-150x150.jpg "Red Paint & Testing Glass Beads")
![One of the best things ever is receiving a bunch of laser cut material in the mail. That means, today wound down with one of these best things. We’ve ordered through Ponoko in the past and we’re continually surprised with how an Illustrator drawing can turn into a physical object so easily. Yes, above that is [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/wpid20753-IMG_1844-150x150.jpg "Acrylic and Aluminum Laser Cuts & Drift V2 ready for review, plus notes on AJAX problems + solutions")
![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")
![Thursday night was a night of decisions and tests. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks just trying to get caught up generally with projects and Thursday marked the beginning of the deciding how to start wrapping up How to Forget the Border Completely and what direction to move in to make some more progress on [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9596-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)")
![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")
![Danielle and I will be heading to Montreal to speak at this year’s Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Biannual Conference at McGill University. We’re presenting in the Cultural Production panel under the theme of Social Practice and Public Space. Our presentation entitled, “Social Practice: New Models for Collaborative Cultural Production,” will frame the city of Windsor [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/montreal-150x150.jpg "Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Conference, McGill University")
![Broken City Lab is heading up to Peterborough, Ontario for all of next week (October 12 – 17, 2009) for an extended field trip to collaborate with Artspace for a series of community and inter-city research initiatives, workshops, and interventions to understand the city of Peterborough, its infrastructures, and its communities. We’ll be blogging extensively [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/peterboroughmap3-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip #001: Artspace in Peterborough")
![Wednesday afternoon shifts into further work on testing the efficacy of the styrofoam letters being black. We’re trying to decide in anticipation of our Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). Sara and Hiba painted. HELLO. Also, Kiki came by to help us paint the movable wall! And, Josh made these for a workshop [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9276-150x150.jpg "Designing & Prototyping tools for intervention: Letter Library + Gif Party")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/scavengethecityposter-v1-150x150.jpg "Scavenge The City")
![We spent part of Monday afternoon doing a site visit for an upcoming project we’ve been planning for a while. The EC Row Walkway crosses over the 6 lanes of EC Row and is a pretty incredible view. We took some measurements and did a quick visibility test. We were only up there for about [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_2037-150x150.jpg "EC Row Walkway Measurement")