Robert Montgomery: the Post-Situationist Tradition
Robert Montgomery works in a poetic and melancholic post-Situationist tradition. He’s created a number of projects that disrupt and hijack illuminated advertising billboards as well as working more directly with custom-fabricated signage. I clearly am in love. [via an email from Rose]
Outpost Journal: Art, Design, and Action from the Fringes
An interesting project to look into … Outpost Journal is a biannual, non-profit print publication on innovative art, design and community action from cities that have been traditionally underexposed beyond their local contexts. Founded in 2010, Outpost aims to give wider exposure to artists and activists from smaller cities back in more recognized centers of artistic [...]
Dynamite Wildflower Guerillas
Guerilla gardener(s) started a website documenting their efforts. It’s simple and makes me very ready to embrace the impending summer. They write: throw sseeds some of them take some dont take some grow then somebody cut it down the bastards. why would someone cut it down i dont know. if it rains too much the [...]
Immaterials: Light painting WiFi
Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo. This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre long measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting. This builds on a technique that [...]
Steve Lambert: It’s Time to Fight
Two things I can’t get enough of — Steve Lambert and huge text signs. Lambert’s latest work, It’s Time to Fight was installed recently in Pittsburgh, PA over a waffle shop. Text-based work continues to inspire me; it’s accesible, layered, timely, and tactical. It can be hidden in plain sight. If you catch it, it can [...]
REPOhistory: Lower Manhattan Sign Project
Stock Market Crashes by Jim Costanzo as part of REPOhistory’s Lower Manhattan Sign Project I’m making my way through Gregory Sholette‘s epic Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Writing as a participating artist and now dark matter art archivist / dare I say historian of sorts, Sholette writes on an incredible [...]
Janine Marchessault & the Leona Drive Project
Photo by wyliepoon. A couple months ago I attended a talk hosted by Janine Marchessault on the Leona Drive project, which is a collaboration between The Public Access Collective and L.O.T. : Experiments in Urban Research (Collective). Justin mentioned the Leona Drive Project back in 2009, but for a refresher: The Leona Drive project commissioned artist [...]
Required Reading: A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible
A great downloaded book/PDF is available over at Half Letter Press. A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination presents a very accessible and readable overview and introduction to the history of art+activism based practices. Well worth the half-hour or so that it will take to read through it. The [...]
This Probably Isn’t Helping: When Gateways Fail
Physical civic improvements are an important step for Windsor. Our gateways, if you’re unfamiliar with the city, are a bit lack-luster at present. Where gateways do exist, the markers are underdeveloped, poorly executed, and are the kind of “this could literally be anywhere” design strategy. Why do gateways matter? Physically and visually defining space is [...]
![For our upcoming Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event (a part of our ongoing Save the City project), we’ll be asking for your participation to help us come up with a list of those very things — the places around Windsor for which we need to apologize, and the places for which we [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_7327-150x150.jpg "Our Ribbons Have Arrived")
![We met yesterday, but too much going on for any photos. I figure that our shared Dropbox folder says most of the important stuff anyways. We’re working towards completing our HFBC publication, which includes things like: posters of inventions on crossing an imagined border wall maps and 3D renderings of a cross-border portal system a [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Screen-shot-2011-05-27-at-10.58.12-AM-150x150.png "Re: Collaborating on a big publication, Dropbox ftw")
![We played catch up on How to Forget the Border Completely on Friday night. We invented new consultancies, planned interviews and events, and came up with new tactics for forgetting a border completely. It was much needed and so much fun!!! While Danielle hides behind her hand… She was also busy inventing these crazy contraptions [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BORDERCONSULTANCY-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 1, 2011 (Forgetting the Border)")
![Broken City Lab Office Hours on Tuesday were hugely productive. We completely finished getting all the resistors on the LED sign, measured out all the letters with flagging tape for the EC Row Project, organized some logistics for the planning stages of a couple other upcoming projects, and figured out the title for our upcoming [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2009-02-04-026-150x150.jpg "Moving Along with Flagging Tape and LEDs")
![Monday night we met with some new friends from Detroit and had an amazingly good conversation about some of the very specific differences between our two cities. Maybe unsurprisingly, much of what we perceive about each other’s cities isn’t entirely correct, and it is exactly those strange assumptions about these two border cities that continue [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_5195-150x150.jpg "The International Hyper-local Exchange")
![Another day went by quickly here on the 400 block of Pelissier. I met another member of the Department of Unusual Certainties through Skype, The Breakroom celebrated its last day, Leesa painted some chalkboard paint on a few walls for her project, we found a blooming cactus in Andrea’s space and made some potato stamps [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_06461-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 7: A Blooming Cactus & Making Potato Stamps")
![The details: Saturday, March 20th at 3pm, meet at the corner of University and Pelissier. 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 invite the community to learn the Francophone history of Windsor through a collective performance [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/BCL-STC-MAR-5x7-french-outlines-10242-150x150.jpg "Sing to the Streets")
![We’re in Calgary working with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, doing a residency based on our “…and then the city…” (ATTC) research. Developed after a six-month community research project back in Windsor called, Save the City, ATTC was initially realized as two billboards in Windsor and an accompanying publication that looked at the cyclical [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/DSC26601-150x150.jpg "ATTC Calgary Day 1: Shortcuts for Urban Resistance & Algorithmic Walks")
![As most of us were busybodies for the duration of last week, it was great to keep the momentum going at Friday’s meeting. We took no time at all in getting to the meat of our discussion- organizing the research for How to Forget the Border Completely. Before marking up the giant brown paper on the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/frday-copy-150x150.jpg "Continuing Productive Fridays: Organizing HFBC")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9596-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)")
![Danielle and I have been in St.Catharines at Brock University working with an Ecopsychology class on a public art project (details to follow in coming week(s). We’re only here for a few days to help get the class started, but it’s been incredibly fun working with a bunch of strangers. We’ve explored the campus and [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/IMG_0155-150x150.jpg "Field Report from St.Catharines")
![The details: Sunday, January 24, 2010 (8pm) at Phog Lounge (157 University Ave W, Windsor) As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab researchers will facilitate a community workshop to brainstorm, uncover, and share personal histories of Windsor, inviting a range of community members to participate in the process. The workshop [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/BCL-STC-Jan-5x7-front-outlines-1024-150x150.jpg "Save the City: Listen to the City")
![Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above). A part of this project involves us going around to each [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_7554-150x150.jpg "Making Lists: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope (Part 1)")
![It’s taken a number of weeks, but we finished wiring the LED sign at tonight’s Office Hours! It was a pretty incredible moment to plug in the sign, turn off the lights, and realize that we made this come together. I’m really, really, really happy with how it turned out!!! There are still a few [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/img_2667-150x150.jpg "The LED Sign is Finished!!!")
![Last night Eric Boucher came to visit myself and my grandma Margaret Mongeau to interview her for Eric’s Micro-Residency with BCL. Each fellow of BCL will be introducing Eric to a person whom he has never met. Eric then will be interviewing each person exclusively on the topic of Windsor. Eric`s interview with my grandma [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/DSC01223-150x150.jpg "Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 1/5")
![Around the maps, we’re beginning to imagine two cities collapsing into one. As part of How to Forget the Border Completely, we’re doing and planning all sorts of things — border portals, border etiquette classes, new maps, new tourism guides, interviews, stories, and imaginary architecture. Michelle and our dear friend, Lee Rodney, spoke about HFBC [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/IMG_8729-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: Feb 18, 2011 (Maps & Portals)")
![As part of a Canada Council for the Arts Inter-Arts Research and Creation grant I received, I will be documenting my work on the project through here, as I anticipate it will cross over into other projects we work on and came out of past projects we’ve completed. This project comes out of Broken City [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_1669-sm-150x150.jpg "Starting New Projects: Researching the Basics of Arduino + LCDs")