By Justin on May 10th, 2010, 8:27 pm 0 Comments

Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?”

We’ll be speaking on the panel, Group Work: The Collective Impetus, along with folks from National Bitter Melon Council, InCUBATE, and students from OTIS’s Public Practice program.

This trip is going to incredible for a few reasons (including getting to see the city of Portland, in all of it’s functionality), but perhaps more importantly, we’re going to be able to speak to a lot of people who are engaged in a practice that is at least slightly aligned to what we do here in BCL. It’s more often the case that we go to a conference as some of the only artists in attendance (an interesting position to be in, but always a little lonely).

There’s so many conversations we want to have, the 3 days we’re actually there likely won’t be enough.

Tagged: BCL collectivism conference group work panel pdx Portland research social practice

By Cristina on February 25th, 2010, 12:34 am 5 Comments

Day two of Create Here‘s City Share Conference was just as busy as the first, but we got tons of work accomplished, and we were even able to take a short tour of the city at lunch!

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Tagged: BCL Chattanooga city share conference create here research tennessee

By Cristina on February 23rd, 2010, 9:30 am 0 Comments

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!

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Tagged: BCL Chattanooga city share conference create here research windsor/detroit relationship

By Justin on February 16th, 2010, 12:03 pm 1 Comments

We’re packing up and heading down to Chattanooga, Tennessee tomorrow to attend CreateHere‘s City Share Mini Conference.

What the conference is all about:

“City Share is a conference for seeding innovative projects.We bring great minds from across disciplines together in Chattanooga, Tennessee to teach, share, plan, and change. The result? International knowledge-sharing; a growing network of change-makers; and organizations across the world better equipped to serve cities, for one, for all.”

We’re excited to catch up with our friends from CreateHere (who visited us back in November), and also to meet a ton of new people. I’m quite sure we’re going to be very inspired — just check out some of the other participants.

As we continue to work on our projects, our research, and our practice, it’s really great to continue to get to know other people who aren’t necessarily working as an arts collective, but are attempting to do some of the same things we are — namely, re-imagining creative activity in response to a place.

Tagged: BCL Chattanooga cities conference create here presentation research travel

By Justin on October 21st, 2009, 1:09 am 3 Comments

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 and the research and practice of Broken City Lab as a model for collaborative cultural production and an experiment in tactically infiltrating the institutions of the city.

It should be a really great conference with other papers tackling, “Youth Artist Networks and Cultural Policy: Possibilities and Pitfalls” by Miranda Campbell, McGill University, or “The Art of Change? Toward Theorizing Community-based Cultural Production” by Sheryl Peters, York University … things like this are hugely good for getting a really fast overview of what other kinds of research are going on across the country—awesome!!!

(Plus, catching up with long lost friends and seeing Immony’s opening at Videographe are huge bonuses!)

Tagged: artist talk BCL conference McGill Montreal presentation research social practice

By Justin on March 4th, 2009, 8:42 pm 4 Comments

I’m heading out to Victoria, BC to present at the Cultural, Social, and Political Thought program’s conference, (inter)disciplinarities: theory & crisis, from March 7-8, 2009. I’ll be presenting Broken City Lab in Panel 3 on “The Urban,” under the title, Broken City Lab: Addressing the City in Crisis through Social Practice.

I’m exceptionally excited about this!

Tagged: BCL conference presentation urban Victoria