If you’re in Kitchener on Saturday (or just needed an excuse to check out CAFKA.11), you should consider attending this panel discussion.
Alongside Pedro Reyes and Lucy Howe, I’ll be discussing the installation at CAFKA and BCL’s practice in general in the context of urban interventions.
The details: Saturday, September 24, 2011, 10:30am-12:30pm @ The Museum (10 King Street West, Kitchener)
After months and months of work, we finally installed our project for CAFKA.11. Led by Josh, Hiba, Kevin, and myself, the project took an incredible amount of research and build time, but we were incredibly excited to see our efforts finally in place in front of Kitchener’s City Hall when we wrapped up the installation last night.
Reflect on Here calls on passersby to think on the infrastructure of the city, the attempt to create place with architecture, and the materiality of the text itself. This project was made possible with the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council‘s Exhibition Assistance Program and the incredible team at CAFKA.
We’re playing catchup. Between vacations, short hiatuses, and our summer schedules, we’ve been busy. However, getting back together, working together again on a more regular basis, and starting up on these projects again has been so great and incredibly rewarding. Our to-do list above is a small start to all of the projects we have on the go.
We’re working to finish up our How to Forget the Border Completely research publication (if you want to participate, check out our micro-grant), we’re planning the logistics of Homework (consider attending!), and we’re in the early stages of the final build for CAFKA.
Continue reading “A Look at Process: building for CAFKA & designing for HFBC”
We’re back to Friday nights. Someone thought to move the tables outside. In the dimming light, we worked. Many things are on the task list.
We’re starting to work on a publication of sorts for How to Forget the Border Completely. It’s been a really clarifying decision to pull the strands of research we’ve been working on for the project together in a form that will allow the entire project to be read at once.
We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices.
Back at the Ecohouse to try to get the plan together to work on a video we’ve been tossing around for a while — final decisions have been elusive, so we put it on hold for now. Instead, we headed out to the front lawn and reminded ourselves of the what we can do with How to Forget the Border Completely.
Executing these projects is just a matter of carving out a day … we spend time planning, testing, experimenting, brainstorming because we know we’re more curious together and our collective curiosity is the driver for every one of these projects. It’s not about the solutions, it’s about the questions.
Continue reading “BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)”
This evening–during a regular BCL group meeting–Hiba, Kevin, and I made a one-off miniature version of the retroreflective CAFKA text installation happening this fall. This miniature is about 7 inches tall, a roughly 1:14 scale model of our proposed text installation. The best part about it is we made the entire thing in about 2-3 hours!
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 our CAFKA project.
Continue reading “BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)”
Earlier this week we received a couple of samples of various retroreflective materials for use on our letters for CAFKA.
One material, the one on the roll, is a vinyl (3M Scotchlite Reflective White Vinyl), perhaps most famously used in the Bright Bike project, while the other is an industrial substrate (3M Engineer Grade White Prismatic Sheeting) used on municipal road safety signs.
I’ve been doing a variety of tests with a flash, the one above where it appears that the Scotchlite vinyl is brighter was taken with my DSLR with the body flash, but the lens I have on there blocks the flash in the lower part of the frame. Tests with photos from my iPhone seem to favour the Prismatic Sheeting.
We’re still examining the costs of each and we still need to do some more rigourous tests, but it’s amazingly helpful to be able to see these side by side (thanks Sarah!) The vinyl has an estimated 7-year service life, the prismatic sheeting is about 10-years. Not sure on the cost difference yet.
Thursday is catch-up night, so there should be lots to talk about. I know Hiba and Karlyn were working on a budget and I think a whole bunch of the crew met up on Monday to do some work. We’ll have to plan some really well-thought-out tests for these materials, in the outdoors, etc., to see how they fare in the weather. I put up a spec-sheet for both materials to our Dropbox. Anxious to figure out the best plan forward!
It was Monday night and Karlyn’s Birthday, so Hiba and Kevin brought a fun cake.
Other things happened as well, and strangely, or maybe expectedly, now that the semester’s done and since we didn’t meet at the very end of the week, we had a marathon five hour meeting. It was so great!!!
Continue reading “BCL Report: April 11, 2011 (oh, the logistics)”
With almost a full crew we spent this Friday night testing finishes, planning ways to cross the border unnoticed, and building supports for the letter ‘R’, all while being filmed by a documentary crew from the Department of Communications, Media & Film.
Above, some notes from Danielle’s sprawling research on inventions for tactically crossing a border.
Continue reading “BCL Report: March 25, 2011 (Imaginary Portals & Ongoing Construction)”