By Justin on December 20th, 2009, 1:11 pm 0 Comments

As previously noted on Windsor Visuals and Tom Lucier’s Twitter (via Planetizen), a number of buildings in Windsor and Detroit are now on Google Earth in all of their SketchUp-rendered glory.

It’s quite interesting to fly around and see what buildings have been modeled, not all of which have been done by the SketchUp team, but by local folks with the talent and skill to do it.

I think this is going to help us with a number of projects, since we love to do Photoshop renderings to imagine projects … having the ability to see those renderings on 3D objects can only make things that much easier. I just wish one of us knew how to use SketchUp.

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Tagged: 3D architecture Detroit google earth maps Windsor

By Justin on December 1st, 2009, 12:07 am 1 Comments

We spent another Monday night at BCL HQ planning out this Windsor-Detroit hyper-local tourism idea and doing some basic research for another upcoming project.

We all have some homework to do, but things are moving along nicely on a number of projects, and with the semester winding down, things should be able to push ahead soon!

More pictures of research involving lightbulbs and lists after the jump.

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Tagged: BCL Detroit hyper-local lightbulbs lists maps research routes Windsor

By Justin on November 26th, 2009, 11:05 am 3 Comments

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 to make us interested in working on cross-border projects.

So, the idea is still fresh, but we’re imagining a route of travel based on the existing public transit infrastructure that can make it much less daunting to move between these two cities and experience what both of them have to offer on a more regular basis. We’re going to start charting these potential routes based on exact schedules of the bus systems in both Windsor and Detroit, to simplify the process of making the cross-border trek.

We’re also imagining greeting committees on both sides of the border and we anticipate eventually making these routes an open kind of thing, wherein if you wanted to head to Detroit from Windsor on a Saturday you would know the exact bus lines and their arrival / departure times at a number of destinations (good restaurants, cafés, interesting architecture), and maybe you might even catch up with other folks on the same adventure.

It’s about looking at this area under different terms. We’ve often talked about just how local Detroit is to Windsor, given its proximity, and yet crossing the border can still seem to be a daunting task for a variety of reasons. So, instead of talking about that locality, what if we thought about the many other places we might travel on a regular basis. Often, when traveling, you have someone to meet you on the other side of the car ride or plane trip and it’s that relationship that can often making traveling a lot easier. So, if you had someone to meet you on the other side of the Detroit River, maybe it might make that bit of travel easier as well.

Tagged: BCL Detroit hyper-local maps public transit research routes Windsor

By Justin on November 19th, 2009, 12:32 am 3 Comments

Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon.

Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done projecting for the year (with the exception of one more upcoming project with the Border Bookmobile). However, we’re already imagining a continuation of the Cross-Border Communication project for next spring.

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Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 18th, 2009, 10:05 am 7 Comments

Last night was the second iteration of Cross-Border Communication where we sent a variety of messages from Windsor to Detroit. We started with “We’ve Missed You.”

We’ll be doing the final iteration of this suite of Cross-Border Communication tonight (Wednesday) around the usual time (8pm).

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Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message performance projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 17th, 2009, 1:47 pm 6 Comments

Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way.

This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.

With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.

Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.

Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.

Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 16th, 2009, 5:44 pm 2 Comments

Tonight, we are going to perform the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication.

Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we have the equipment we need to realize this project.

Cross-Border Communication was initially imagined through a collaborative effort between Broken City Lab and students from the Vincent Massey Secondary School Junior Physics Club in Windsor, Ontario. The project will attempt to hijack and transform communicative efforts between Windsor and Detroit, which has historically been based solely on economic exchange.

The projection will begin at approximately 8pm near the foot of Ouellette Avenue and Riverside Drive in Windsor and will run for approximately 30 minutes. The projection will be visible from Detroit and from the edge of Windsor’s waterfront.

Tagged: BCL campus Detroit projection research Windsor

By Justin on November 12th, 2009, 10:38 am 2 Comments

Installed by medical students from Wayne State University at Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, The Detroit Medical Art Project seeks to highlight the lack of healthcare for many of Detroit’s residents.

Asking questions like, “How do you take care of your patients when the community is falling apart all around you?”, the students created the project from scavenged materials and donated equipment to depict a medical clinic that is so desperately needed in the area.

There’s a video in the Detroit Free Press article that features some quick, but good, interviews with the medical students who created the project, and shows some of the installation process. It’s interesting to know that type of discussion goes on in the classroom for medical training, and quite inspiring to see the kind of dialogue being generated through an installation.

[via Wooster Collective & Detroit Free Press]

Tagged: art Detroit Heidelberg Project installation medical students Wayne State

By Justin on November 3rd, 2009, 3:48 pm 3 Comments

We spent yesterday evening out around town with our projector and new power inverter, testing sight-lines and potential backup locations for the Cross-Border Communication project.

We’re getting close to knowing exactly how and when we’ll get to do this project, and you can see our research and field tests after the jump.

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Tagged: battery BCL Detroit inverter projection research test university Windsor

By Justin on October 30th, 2009, 12:11 pm 0 Comments

Monday night was another huge brainstorming session with some new and old friends. We spent most of the evening trying to figure out the potentials in doing something like a floating sculpture in the Detroit River. We’ve discussed this before, and it seems that the space between what we’d really like to do and reality is quite large.

That’s part of the fun though, how do you generate some kind of communication across borders without alerting the authorities, or how do you manage the headaches of going through the proper channels?

At some point we headed down to the basement and looked at a kayak Rod made when he was in grade 8 (pictured above). We wondered if it could act as a potential substrate for one part of the project. Though we talked about projects like the Waterpod Project or Andrea Zittel’s Pocket Property Floating Island project, it became fairly clear that anything we could do in the short-term would need to involve a kind of very limited-duration kind of exchange between Windsor and Detroit.

We also talked about a kind of guided tours of neighbourhoods in Windsor and Detroit (and while these have already been happening), the difference here would be to exchange with a group of folks from Detroit, so that we give them a list or map to see parts of our city, while we get to head across for a neighbourhood level tour of places in Detroit!

Tagged: BCL boat border Detroit Detroit river floating sculpture Green Corridor kayak research Windsor