Panel Discussion: Intervention: Contemporary Artists in the Urban Space
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 [...]
CAKFA.11: Reflect on Here
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 [...]
We’re outside around a table, together. It’s May. How to Forget the Border Completely.
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 [...]
BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)
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 [...]
CAFKA Miniature
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 [...]
BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)
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 [...]
Retroreflective Materials Test
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 [...]
BCL Report: April 11, 2011 (oh, the logistics)
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!!!
BCL Report: March 25, 2011 (Imaginary Portals & Ongoing Construction)
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 [...]
![Last Wednesday, Justin, Michelle, Josh and I flew from Detroit, MI to Atlanta, GA and drove another two hours to Chattanooga, TN for the City Share conference put on by our friends from Create Here! Veronique picked us up from the the airport in Atlanta. We grabbed a bit of food and then headed straight [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_3050-150x150.jpg "Our Arrival to Chattanooga, TN and Day One of the City Share Conference!")
![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")
![I’ll write a full post when it isn’t nearly three in the morning, but I just wanted to toss out this thing that I started working on tonight. A couple of us are trying to come up with any number of actions that might serve the dual purpose of helping to stave off (or at [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/postoffice-colouring-150x150.png "Community coloring")
![Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon. Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_4080-150x150.jpg "Cross-Border Communication: Want to Be Friends? (and other things we needed to say)")
![The details: Sunday, April 11th via email & Tuesday, April 27th at 7pm, at Artspeak Gallery. As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab is inviting Windsorites to venture out into the city and take five photographs that showcase what makes our city “worth saving.” These photographs will be turned into [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/BCL-STC-APR-5x7-outlines-sm-150x150.jpg "Things Worth Saving")
![We’ll give you a place to stay and resources for 72 hours. You’ll help us fix the city. For the last year, we’ve been working away on a number of initiatives that have come out of our very specific examinations of Windsor, Ontario. The ways in which we see, experience, and move through the city [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/BCL_microresidency3-150x150.jpg "Broken City Lab: Micro-Residencies")
![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")
![Meeting twice in a week is awesome. I can’t say that enough. So much time makes us way more productive and makes it a lot easier to be OK with not having everyone there all the time. First on the list, doing some really, really quick tests of the potential of embedding LEDs in ice [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6483-150x150.jpg "Snow, LEDs, Flights, Fill-in-the-blanks, Proofs, and Postcards")
![Yesterday morning on Pelissier was very loud and hectic. When I arrived there was about 3 feet of sidewalk space in front of 406. It was another eventful day as we were joined by The Swap Shop . I did some catching up with Jefferson, Julie and Andrea as well. Big machines looked like dinosaurs [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_08461-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 5: Clothes, Trucks, Lightbulbs and Flowers.")
![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")
![It’s been an incredible few weeks prepping for the launch of CIVIC SPACE and the Letter Library. Huge props to everyone who helped out, especially Kiki Athanassiadis & Lucy Howe! There’s a few hundred letters strewn about the space, waiting for you to takeout and caption the city. Stop by over the next few weeks — [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wpid18599-IMG_0310-150x150.jpg "Recap of the Letter Library Opening Event!")
![Though we’re still very much in the middle of thinking about, beginning to write about, and generally talk about all of the amazing things that we learned as part of Save the City, these billboards are the last part of the project to be launched. These two statements are among the many, many, many that [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/KnewItWasntAlone-520-150x150.jpg "…and then the city…")
![The details: Sunday, February 28, 2010 (1pm) at 362 California Ave, Windsor As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, and to better understand the city and its rich and failed history, Broken City Lab researchers will host an open community event on Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 1pm to map and invent two [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/BCL-STC-FEB-1024-150x150.jpg "Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_9710-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)")
![We recently decided to demarcate some of many accidental meadows across Windsor with these Naturalized Area signs. In hopes that these signs might momentarily allow residents of Windsor to look at these naturalized spaces for what they are—that is, wonderful additions to our urban landscape—instead of the result of a politically-charged issue, we spent the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/IMG_3023-150x150.jpg "Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas")
