By Justin on January 29th, 2010, 9:35 am 0 Comments

kanarinka is a new media artist whose research interests include the politics of digital information, feminist performance art, participatory culture and the emotional landscape of Homeland Insecurity. She is Co-Founder of the non-profit collective iKatun, a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and teaches at RISD’s Digital+Media Graduate Program and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In Spring 2007, kanarinka ran the entire evacuation route system in Boston and measured its distance in breaths. The project is an attempt to measure our post-9/11 collective fear in the individual breaths that it takes to traverse these new geographies of insecurity.

The $827,500 Boston emergency evacuation system was installed in 2006 to demonstrate the city’s preparedness for evacuating people in snowstorms, hurricanes, infrastructure failures, fires and/or terrorist attacks.

It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston consists of a series of running performances in public space (2007), a web podcast of breaths (2007), and a gallery installation of the archive of breaths (2008). There’s also an online collection of podcasts, with audio recordings made during each running performance.

The work is being shown as a part of Experimental Geography, an exhibition that explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth. I picked up the book from this traveling exhibition a while ago and it’s an interesting read. There’s some inspiring work, but as is often the case with these kind of collection books, the introduction is far more enlightening than many of the preceding chapters.

What I like about this project is the physical translation of a kind of bureaucracy along with the gesture of exploration through so much of the city under the restrictions of urgency and evacuation. It makes me want to imagine ways for exploring bureaucracies of Windsor.

Tagged: art Boston city context evacuation performance reblog running

By Justin on January 3rd, 2010, 12:55 pm 0 Comments

Josh, Cristina, and I spent a part of the afternoon yesterday speaking with Josh Mehler, formerly of the Windsor/Detroit area, now studying at Florida State, working on a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition.

It was a great conversation, and as always, these kind of casual interviews help us to articulate what we’re trying to do in an expanded manner. We talked a lot about why we use text, how the idea of composition can move into a physical space, and what the potentials are in connecting artists and writers more often and in alternative spaces. My favourite interviews are the ones where I learn something too, which in this case, I definitely did.

I think Josh will be posting excerpts from the interview on his blog, so be sure to tune in there.

Tagged: BCL city conversation interview text Windsor writing

By Justin on December 10th, 2009, 6:09 pm 3 Comments

This is a postcard of Windsor’s downtown from 1959. In the last 50 years, one might imagine that much has changed, though I never would have guesses this much.

Everything in red has been demolished.

It seems like a lot of change, though I’m not sure how much better off we are for it.

[via International Metropolis]

Tagged: annotation city demolition downtown Windsor

By Justin on November 28th, 2009, 12:37 am 0 Comments

Beautiful City is a new campaign based out of Toronto that is trying to persuade the city to create a tax for billboards that would do the following:

1. A historical 53% increase to the annual municipal funding available to all artists, festivals and arts institutions,
2. Close to $100 000.00 dollars for public realm improvement for each Toronto ward, every year – for projects such as greening,
3. Almost a 1/3 of a million dollars for each of the 13 priority neighbourhoods to fund accessible youth arts programming, and
4. Hiring 17 dedicated officers to enforce the new billboard bylaw.

The premise of the campaign is that billboard advertising, unlike all other forms of advertising, provides no content to the public in exchange for taking up public space (editorial to advertising ratios for TV is 75/25, for print is usually 50/50 but for billboards is 0 to 100).

Sounds like a fairly genius idea. What other ways could we think of generating new revenue for arts organizations in the city, given the likely continuing or eventual decline of funding for the arts in the city?

[via View on Canadian Art / image of Three Billboards About Love by Peter Fuss]

Tagged: billboard city context funding Toronto

By Justin on November 11th, 2009, 9:51 am 0 Comments

In Philadelphia, an artist named Steve Powers is working alongside the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create this large-scale mural project that paints huge sentiments of love letters onto the sides of 50 buildings on one street.

The project is called A Love Letter For You and totally made me think that there might just be potential in murals after all.

Take a look at the project blog and read it from first post to the most recent, it really gives some great context to the project.

[via an email from Nathan]

Tagged: city context graffiti mural Philadelphia text

By Justin on October 29th, 2009, 12:31 pm 0 Comments

Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark opened up Food in New York in the early 1970s on the corner of Prince and Wooster. The restaurant, essentially the first in SoHo, was run by artists and served mostly artists, with the cooking itself becoming a performance of sorts. This transition of the space from a failed Puerto Rican restaurant to Food’s occupation to an alternative space that functioned as and questioned art and the potential in economic models based on something other than profit growth.

Established as a kind of “perpetual dinner party”, the restaurant as an idea was the art, alongside the actual dishes served up, the design, and the performance of cooking. Conceptually that’s important, but what’s really becomes interesting is the idea to open a place that wasn’t founded on profit, and indeed collapsed in some ways because of that. However, certainly that’s not the point.

Creating an idea with a sunset date, or with an acceptance of failure from the start, allows for a focus on the things beyond regular concerns. In the case of Food, artists stood in as guest chefs, inedible food was served, a hub of activity was created, and whether or not it succeeded, and indeed eve the tools with which one could measure the success or lack thereof, became irrelevant.

So, what if the next idea you have came along with a self-imposed sunset date? How would you work differently? What would become a priority and what would fade into the background? Tom’s recent post on the not-for-profit restaurant in Windsor, Namaste, invites similar questions and provides some encouraging answers.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also quickly mention Matta-Clark’s significant architectural interventions, again something deserving of its own post, eventually. His “building cuts” works in some ways paralleled the thinking behind an initiative like Food, in the case of these large-scale architectural works though, the question became, what if walls didn’t matter?

Tagged: artist city context food new york city performance restaurant social practice

By Justin on October 27th, 2009, 11:59 am 2 Comments

This is important. If you care at all about what culture in Windsor will look like for the foreseeable future, you need to show up on Thursday night to what likely is going to be one of the last opportunities to voice some input for the City of Windsor’s Cultural Master Plan. It’s this plan that’s going to determine what can and cannot happen at many, many levels across the cultural sector in Windsor for years to come.

The City of Windsor and TCI Management Consultants are hosting an open house for the community on Thursday, October 29, 2009 between 5-9 pm at Mackenzie Hall Cultural Centre located at 3277 Sandwich Street. A short presentation about the master plan will be made at 7 pm. The City is gathering public input to help set a direction for the future of the community’s cultural resources. Everyone is invited to attend this free event.

For slightly more information, you can check out the City of Windsor’s Newsroom.

And the details one more time: (this) Thursday, October 29, 2009 – Mackenzie Hall, 5-9pm.

P.S. That’s the interior of one of Windsor’s “cultural assets,” the Capitol Theatre.

Tagged: city culture master plan planning show up Windsor

By Justin on October 26th, 2009, 8:14 am 0 Comments

Evidence that even in a cultural hub like Montreal, some things can still be broken.

We’re back from the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference—it was a great success, lots of positive feedback on our presentation, and finally meeting some people we’ve been in touch with over the last six months or so … it’s just a matter now of condensing many names, email addresses, and business cards into one coherent list (or something).

Tagged: broken city Montreal pole rope

By Justin on October 9th, 2009, 2:39 pm 5 Comments

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 on our activities and experiences, running our research hub / studio out of Artspace’s main gallery. We’ll be following this nightly schedule, while also exploring, documenting, creating, and planning each day:

October 13, 14, 15, 16: “Open Office Hours” Ongoing Open Office Hours / Public Meetings / Workshops daily at 4-5:30pm

October 13: “Extended Field Trip: An Introduction to Our Social Practice” Opening Artist Talk / Overview of Research Plans for Peterborough at 7pm

October 14: “Get Lost: An Algorithmic Adventure with Strangers” Exploring the City and Getting to Know Neighbourhoods on Foot at 5pm

October 15: “Open Forum: On the City of Peterborough” Townhall Meeting / Community Discussion on the city of Peterborough at 7pm

October 16: “Home Work from an Extended Field Trip: Comparing notes on what to do with the city in 96 hours” Closing Performance / Activity at 7pm

If you’re in Peterborough or the area, here’s the address for Artspace: 3/378 Aylmer St. N. Peterborough, Ontario.

Tagged: artist run centre Artspace BCL city exhibition extended field trip Peterborough research study

By Justin on October 6th, 2009, 9:48 pm 15 Comments

As part of FAM Fest 09, we did a projection performance on the roof of Metro Cleaners accessed from Empire Lounge in downtown Windsor.

For about an hour and a half, we presented our 100 Ways to Save the City and then asked for ideas from the folks on the ground, at Phog, and on the Twitterverse.

After the jump, there’s 160-something photos from all the ideas that were projected on Saturday night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: 100 ways BCL brick city lists night projection research text Windsor