Trade School: Education Through Barter
OurGoods, an online barter network, is running a pop-up storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That storefront is called Trade School and it’s a series of classes that centralizes the act of barter and exchange and a pop up classroom in New York City’s Lower East Side. It works like this: “Take a class [...]
Fallen Fruit Collective
Fallen Fruit Collective formed six years ago through a project by artists David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (ps. you should read it). Using fruit as their lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. A number of [...]
It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston by kanarinka
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 [...]
Ok, I finally get #000000book
It took a while. A little over a week I guess. However, it finally clicked — FAT Labs’ latest project #000000book is starting to make sense to me in terms of how big it could be. Part of the problem may have been just the early overview of the project that circulated the blogs: #000000book [...]
Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson
At any one time there are around 6000 lightning storms happening across the world, amounting to some 16 million storms each year. Such dizzying statistics are useful to hold in mind while experiencing Streetlight Storm, a new artwork by Katie Paterson. Paterson’s work often deals with the translation of experiences of nature to representations of [...]
David Rokeby’s long wave
David Rokeby is a Canadian artist who worked for years in new media, creating interactive installations, and exhibiting them around the world (including here in Windsor most recently at the 2008 Media City -curated AGW exhibition). I had the opportunity to work with him on that 2008 show, Plotting Against Time, and he is one [...]
Vanessa Harden: the Subversive Gardening
Canadian-born / UK-based designer, Vanessa Harden has invented a number of camouflaged devices meant to ease the process of guerrilla gardening. Among things like ankle-attached mechanical seed distribution, briefcases that dig holes, and purses designed to easily carry plants to the site of installation, Harden hacked a Pentax camera to create what she calls, the [...]
Apartment Gallery / Alternative Spaces
Photo: Robert Wright for The New York Times It seems as though this discussion crops up every now and again on our site here. We’ve written about alternative spaces before and we’re currently working out of a house on the edge of the University campus. I think that these spaces that can be multi-use, imagined [...]
![Courtesy of the always brilliant Steven … There’s now a new submission form that allows you to get a quick preview of what your Text In-Transit panel could look like, along with a fun little colour swatch. If you’ve already submitted, it’s worth submitting more just to try this out, and if you haven’t submitted yet—get [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/bcl_textintransit-submit-150x150.jpg "New Text In-Transit Submission Form!")
![Michelle and I spent hours and hours together yesterday. With everyone’s schedules fairly ridiculous at the moment, we’re trying to steal what little time we can to keep working. Lately, the time that we’ve all spent together has been framed exclusively almost exclusively by planning for Save the City or organizing the Storefront Residencies for [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_9749-sm-150x150.jpg "Later Nights, since it’s summer now")
![In case you missed any of our spontaneous posts earlier today, here’s a quick recap of all the stuff that we got done! It may look a little strange, but our jigsaw rig Kevin put together has really been a huge help today. Hiba made it through nearly 70 letters — and no wrist pain! [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9174-150x150.jpg "Tuesday Recap: in case you missed it, super jigsaw rig, graphic design in progress & other notes")
![As summer rolls on, we’re continuing our work with the magnetic planters, though we now have the benefit of a front porch to enjoy the evening weather while doing so. Michelle, Josh, and I spent Monday night working on embedding the magnets into the plastic bag planters along with some more writing. We also moved [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_4671-150x150.jpg "Embedding Magnets")
![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")
![At Windsor’s riverfront, SAVE A CITY, installed this afternoon. We opted out of using monofilament to hang the blocks of ice because there was a nice snowbank already there, and probably the last thing the Detroit River needs is more garbage in it. I’ll post some photos of the process of making these soon (definitely [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/img_2536-2-150x150.jpg "Save A City")
![A little while ago, we were trying to think through how to wrap up Save the City with a pair of billboards. We spent an evening really working through some ideas and came up with two statements that we felt articulated the end of a certain way of thinking about Windsor. Something about those statements [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2247-150x150.jpg "…and then the city, a book")
![So, we’ve been busy working on the final parts of some of the Save the City projects, in particular, pulling together the postcards for this month’s Things Worth Saving (April 27th, remember?!) We wound up with around 65 photographs submitted by some fellow Windsorites of the things that they think are worth saving in the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/IMG_9124-150x150.jpg "Playing Catch Up on Save the City")
![Following up on our How to Forget the Border Completely project from last year, collaborator Tom Provost continues to work on ideas around pedestrian border crossings (which you can read all about in the HFBC book!) Photos and text by Tom Provost In the summer of 2011, I was in dialogue with Broken City Lab [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/03_707px_provost_640-trim-150x150.jpg "How to Forget the Border Completely, continued: 707PX")
![We spent Friday back at Lebel, reminding us of the meetings we used to have a couple years ago when all this was just starting up. Given the size of the school and the resources readily available (like tools, multiple desks, ample light), we split up into smaller groups to tackle some “next steps” for [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/IMG_8817-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: February 24, 2011 (back to Lebel)")
![Our project for the 2011 Windsor Biennial, Alive & Well, was created with the hope that it would be captured on Google Maps to make a monument or announcement of sorts to the rest of the world about Windsor as we near the end of the year and ahead of being torn up for the new Aquatic [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/aliveandWellscreenshot-2-150x150.jpg "“Alive & Well” viewable on Google Maps")
![It was just Rosina and I on Wednesday night, but we didn’t let that stop us from starting some new work! I remember when I first posted / talked about the Imaginary Platform, Rosina had seemed keen on figuring out a way to distribute it. So, that’s how we spent the evening, working through ideas [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_3495-150x150.jpg "Oversized Envelopes: Working on Distributing an Imaginary Platform")
![We’ve spent the last couple of weeks settling into our new headquarters, working on applications and ideas for the fall and winter. We’ve also cleared our consultancy out of the downtown space, seeing as Visual Fringe is over and it was high on the to-do list. Having a dedicated space has been incredible so far, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_4539-150x150.jpg "The Last Couple Weeks at BCL HQ")
![A note from Stephen Hargreaves after our conversation last night about the bus system in Detroit and possibilities for cross-border transportation… the image above is of a different Detroit map just to give some reference. On the map Stephen mentions, the routes go far beyond Detroit’s city limits. Check out the “System Map”, where the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screen-shot-2011-01-03-at-1.35.48-PM-150x150.png "Detroit bus services…")
![Over the last week or so, we’ve added a few new things to our little website here. It’s funny because there’s a lot of research that goes on in the background, in terms of things we come across and don’t blog about, ideas that we email to one another, and documenting our process and posting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/bcl-sidebar-dec09-150x150.jpg "How we use this site for research (in-part)")
![I went out to the site for our proposed community garden to take some photos yesterday. It’s looking fairly likely that this will be the site for our community garden starting this summer. This park is located at Russell and Mill near the Sandwich windmill. We’re still working out all the details, but everything has [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_4065-150x150.jpg "Community Garden Site")
![Yesterday morning Rosina and I went to the Art Gallery of Windsor for the install of BCL’s piece that is going in the Border Cultures: Part One (Homes, Land) along with some other great artists. The show is opening next week on January 25th. We spent the majority of the remainder of day planning for the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/wpid21140-IMG_2187-150x150.jpg "Regret/Resolve: Exhibition Planning")