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.

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!

After breakfast, we broke off into our groups once again.  We were still trying to come up with a definite plan on how to re-establish a relationship between Windsor and Detroit, so Sheldon drew up a little indirect/direct line graph.  The seed-bombs with attached love letter is on the far indirect side, our projections are in the middle, and getting passports to citizens is on the far direct side.

After a bit of brainstorming, we came up with a proposed solution of creating a youth exchange program between Windsor and Detroit.   This program ideally would improve cross-border relations for future generations of Windsor-Detroit residents by fostering civic pride, cultural awareness, and a sense of ownership over issues affecting both cities.

Bijan, Veronique and Michelle brainstorming some more before lunch.

During our lunch break, we headed down the road to catch the FREE shuttle that goes through the city, that also has FREE wi-fi!

Not to mention, the bus was also electric powered!

Carta bus.

On the bus, on our way to the river.

Downtown Chattanooga.

Bridge in front of the aquarium.

Chattanooga skyline.

Walnut street pedestrian bridge, which was closed for construction.

Michelle excited that she found some graffiti underneath the bridge.

Some Chattanooga history on the pedestrian bridge.

Tennessee river.

Walnut street bridge again.

Sculpture, and some nice looking, yet not very practical (as the Chattanoogans claim) stairs.

Another sculpture.

Hunter Art Museum.

Myself, taking photos, as per usual.

Hunter Art Museum.

Aquarium sculpture on another bridge.

We finally found some graffiti in Chattanooga on their bridge!

The Delta Queen.

Across the bridge is the entrance to Coolidge Park.

Leo’s Handmade Gallery resembled Windsor’s Made in Windsor store.

Drink coffee and Destroy.

Piano sculpture.

Building for sale.  Reduced price.

Everyone regrouping after lunch at the Create Here HQ.

The group working busily.  We decided that we wanted to engage two classes, one from each city, in a three month long arts-cased exchange that documents, discusses and contends with the border between Detroit and Windsor.

Jason, Maggie and Michelle working out more details.  The classes would comprise of around 20 students each (10-12 years in age) who will interact in a series of increasingly direct conversations.  A cornerstone of the project will also be to obtain passports for all participating students.  As a result, they’ll be able to participate in four cross-border exchanges and contribute to an art piece that lives in the neighboring city.

Leading up to those final four exchanges, members of Broken City Lab will team up with a similar organization in Detroit to serve as mentors for the classes. Broken City has expertise in developing public art pieces, planning workshops, and documenting processes so that they can be used by others. With this base of skills, Broken City will help the kids develop unique channels for communication with their student-neighbors. The classes will learn about the other city, but more importantly, will develop fluency in the issues facing their own.

The whole project starts with a bang. Given Broken City’s experience with projections, it seems that using this format to draw attention to the permeability (and permanence) of the border is a perfect fit. One idea? A cross-border game of tic-tac-toe projected on the riverfront.

A series of smaller projects will happen almost weekly. These will be specifically themed to engage an age group other than our own. We imagine they’d dig a game of pictionary done via snail mail; a guitar hero Skype tournament; the development of a Windsor/Detroit student Facebook group; even a simple act of skill-sharing via video or blog. But what matters most is finding ways to encourage communication between the students that is genuine, appropriate, and easy.

The name ideas we came up with are “Love, Your Neighbour” or possibly, “Love, Your Neighbo(u)r.”

Some of the barriers of this process include the obtaining of the passports, finding the proper time to run such a program (during the school year vs. in the summer), parental consent/support, finding a good partnership on the Detroit side, man-power (since we’re volunteer based), and of course, funding.

We’d be able to gauge the success of the project by the impressions of the home city/away city and the comfort level that is measured of the home/away city after the project is finished.

Meanwhile, Justin and Josh joined the Wichita group in brainstorming ideas of how they could reconnect their city as well.  They came up with a concept entitled, “Kiss & Tell” which would spark up some community revitalization within Wichita.

Working on their presentation.

Michelle and I giving the group our presentation on all of the work we accomplished over the past two days!

At the end of the conference, Josh, Michelle, Justin and I headed across the river and back to Sluggo’s for our last Chattanoogan meal.  We chatted about the conference and shared our different experiences. Being able to interact with so many like-minded individuals at the conference was such a huge opportunity for us.  We all learned a lot!  Thanks to all of our new American friends for teaching us so much, and to all of our old friends at Create Here for inviting us to participate in City Share!

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 to the NPR station in Chattanooga to do a quick radio interview about our practice, and then we headed to our hotel for a much needed rest.

We took a quick nap before we went out for dinner.  This giant  parking garage was located across the street from our hotel.

We went out for dinner with the Create Here folk and some new friends from Charlottesville, VA at this cute vegan restaurant called Sluggo’s that’s owned by the Tennessee punk band This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb!

Michelle and Justin chatting with some friends near the end of the night.  Afterward, we all went back to the hotel and crashed for the night.  Long day, but we were eager for the conference the next day!

The next morning at the Create Here office.  Check out how busy our two days were!

Grabbing some delicious breakfast.

The main room of the office.  Everyone’s chatting and waiting for the introductory presentations.

After the presentations, we broke off into our cities and had some Create Here folk join us in brainstorming our city’s main problems.

Sheldon was our group leader.  He introduced us to the impact/urgency matrix which we used to figure out what problems we should focus on.

Trey, Michelle, Josh and Bijan brainstorming.

A happy looking group.

Michelle bringing up some great points no doubt!

Sheldon continuing to work on the matrix.

We decided that the relationship between Detroit and Windsor was the most interesting problem to focus on since there was a group from Wichita who mentioned a similar problem between the East and West sides of their city which is also separated by a river.  We hoped that some of their group could join our forces to collaborate on ideas to reconstruct these broken relationships!

Taking some notes down.  Michelle and I were appointed the “Champions” of our group and were asked to present our issue to the group once we reconvened with everyone.

Michelle and I presented and then it was lunch time!  Everyone had to fill out a ballot ranking which issues they found the most interesting, and fill out what assets they’d provide a group.

Josh went around and took some photos of the office space.  We got to ride those bikes around the neighbourhood a few times!  Also those giant yellow STAND letters are part of Create Here’s Pepsi Refresh campaign, “Stand & Deliver: Education.”

The print station!

I loved all of the exposed brick.  Definitely my favorite aspect of the office!

Some folk from Chicago and Charlottesville eating lunch!

Giant desk/work area.  Great for brainstorming sessions! I believe one of the groups took over this section of the office!

Art-o-Mat! Put in some coins and get “arists in cellophane!”

After lunch, we found out that our issue was voted as one of the issues to focus on, so Michelle and I broke into different groups with some Create Here, Charlottesville and Wichita friends.  Justin joined the Wichita group and Josh joined the Charlottesville group.

Michelle and Sheldon brainstorming an asset map.

Here’s our finished asset map of Windsor.  The blue arrows represent connections and the red dotted lines represent broken connections.

Continuing the brainstorming.

Michael, Sheldon, Veronique and Michelle still discussing.

After we broke out of groups for the day, we decided to walk back to our hotel and rest up a bit before dinner time.  It’s hard to make out, but there are paintings of trains all along the front of this building.

Some run down Chattanooga buildings.  Chattanooga is not much different than Windsor.

Cute art.  One thing Michelle noticed about Chattanooga right away was the fact that there is hardly any graffiti anywhere.

Chattanooga Choo Choo.  We kept noticing how dominant the red florescent lights were all around the city.  Much like Windsor’s Caesars sign.

Josh and I.

Chattanooga is filled with doers.

Michelle, Josh and Justin running toward this giant, painted American flag.

More bright red text.

Grand blvd, where our hotel was located.

Also just outside of our hotel.

We went back to the Create Here office to eat some dinner, have some fun and to chat with all of our new friends.  We were eager for day two and to get cracking on some ideas on how to build up a relationship with Detroit!  We didn’t come up with any concrete solutions by day one, but some of the ideas we came up with included creating hyperlocal tours of Windsor and Detroit for their respective citizens, creating a pen pal correspondence, giving the cities small presents such as seed bombs with notes attached and  youth exchange programs.

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.

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!)

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!