Detroit Je T’aime – a new interactive documentary
Lafayette Coney Island from Detroit je t’aime on Vimeo. Nora Mandray (director/producer) and Hélène Bienvenu (co-producer) are part of a growing group of people who believe that Detroit, MI, is a laboratory for the city of tomorrow. They’re a duo of French filmmakers/journalists, and they’ve been working for over a year on an interactive documentary [...]
Designing & Prototyping tools for intervention: Letter Library + Gif Party
Wednesday afternoon shifts into further work on testing the efficacy of the styrofoam letters being black. We’re trying to decide in anticipation of our Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). Sara and Hiba painted. HELLO. Also, Kiki came by to help us paint the movable wall! And, Josh made these for a workshop [...]
First Decisions of the Day … and notes from breakfast
First decisions of the day to be made — whether to commit or not to painting the letters black or white. Somehow this has been one of the longest ongoing discussions we’ve had for a while. The next step though is to paint and test in the wild. The letters from the table view. Notes [...]
Tuesday Recap: in case you missed it, super jigsaw rig, graphic design in progress & other notes
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! [...]
Sarah Margolis-Pineo on Curatorial Practices
It seems that in many ways, the grand show global biennial has been played out, and artists and collectives are again forging new spaces.
Scratch Markup Language (.sml)
From FAT (Free Art & Technology): SML (Scratch Markup Language) is a new file format for recording and replaying turntablism. We’ve developed open-source tools for accurately capturing the record and crossfader movements of a scratch DJ, allowing us to analyze, transcribe, and recreate scratch performances. We want to do for turntablism what Graffiti Markup Language has [...]
Mail(Art)
Thanks to an email Justin had sent me a few days ago, I’ve discovered the existence of mail art! Sometimes, I miss the qualities of snail mail; the anticipation of its arrival, receiving it, and the heartfelt ingredients inside of it. Lately, I’ve been all about sending letters. The photo above is one of three [...]
Robo-Rainbow: instruments of mass destruction
This has already been passed around a number of blogs, but thought it was worth noting on here — this one goes out to Michelle. Robo-Rainbow is a work by Akay, as part of his instruments of mass destruction (complicated technical solution to aide in simple acts of vandalism). via today and tomorrow
DIY: Air Quality Balloons
I found this post not too long ago and have been wanting to make one of these ever since. What’s making these balloons glow is the pollutants in the air around them, with colours ranging from green (signifying excellent air quality) to red (poor air quality).
Micro-Residency #4: Iga Janik
Iga Janik is an artist, curator, and the director of Artspace in Peterborough. We got to hang out with her back in October for about a week. It was awesome, and now we get to hang out again, but this time, in Windsor. For her Micro-Residency, Iga will be bringing some micro radio transmitters, which [...]
![Last night, Hiba, Sara, and Justin tackled some initial planning for the installation of the CIVIC SPACE / Letter Library sign. The Letter Library idea came out of trying to think through how we might make our own sign for the space, so it’s really great to finally see the letters going up. Hiba got on the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9982-150x150.jpg "Installing the sign for CIVIC SPACE, take 1")
![I’ve been thinking about Windsor – Detroit tourism lately for our How to Forget the Border Completely project and since LivingSocial did such a good job advertising to me on facebook, I signed up for weekly Detroit deals and coupons to be e-mailed to me. I’m on week 3 or 4 and so far I’ve [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/michelledetroitdeal-150x150.jpg "Detroit Deals")
![In what feels like the first time in months, we got together and worked on making something (that is, as opposed to planning something). We’re getting started on what is going to be an epic project, time-wise. We’re making a bunch of large 3D cardboard letters. Collaborative Apartment Studio is very fun. Danielle and I [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_07931-150x150.jpg "A New Project Begins: Cardboard, a projector, and lots of editing")
![In preparation of our upcoming Tetris Tournament / Wheat Paste Demo / Sticker Making Party, we had made a list of supplies and had set out to find the goods at (what we thought) was an obvious choice—Value Village. At the top of our list was a hot plate, Tetris for SNES, and supplies for making [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/the-glory-that-is-value-village-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – Nov 1, 2008")
![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")
![Thursday night Cristina and I were up in Toronto at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, participating in the Christopher Hume curated exhibition, Public Realm. We did a series of projections with short texts / fill-in-the-blanks that dealt with issues of public and private space, which were generated from the answers to the questionnaires we [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_8787-copy-150x150.jpg "Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm")
![It would be great if you could come. We’ll be at 350 City Hall Sq West, across the street from Charles Clark Square at 9:30pm. We’ll have a projector and a bunch of bristol board. We want to look at what public consultation could look like and how we might imagine the changes we want [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/bcl-citycounsel-150x150.jpg "9:30pm tonight, an open conversation on the walls of city hall, you’re invited")
![As Michelle mentioned last week, we’re doing a projection inside of The Magic Stick as part of the We Like Music Festival in Detroit this Saturday, September 18. The organizers of We Like Music invited us to do something — so, we figured we would come up with a great big list of things we [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/welikemusic-520-150x150.jpg "We Like Music, We Love Detroit")
![Wednesday was a big day in the SRSI spaces. Lea Bucknell held her Garden Party in 424 unveiling the portraits and stories that she made of Windsor residents, ProClick Factory arrives from Toronto, Thom Provost and Josh Babcock work on some hand-drawn diagrams. Robin Fitzsimons has been training hard every day in the window spaces [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_0906-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 20: Garden Party!!!")
![Despite the snow, the lethargy onset by exam schedules and year-end assignments, and a few core BCL folk leaving town for the summer, we had a great and productive meeting. We started going through the Text In-Transit submissions, continued working on our magnetic planters, worked on our Rhizome commission, brainstormed the idea of a book, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_3992-150x150.jpg "Planning for Spring")
![Day 2 of SRSI went awesome! We are almost all settled into 406, 410 and 424 Pelissier. I started off the day by cleaning and organizing my desk in the entrance of 410. I’ll be stationed here throughout the residency so come and say hi! Over at The Breakroom in 406, Jolie had some fresh [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_0714-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 2 : The People’s Museum, The Breakroom and More Painting")
![We’ll give you a place to stay and resources for 72 hours. You’ll help us fix the city. For the last year, we’ve been working away on a number of initiatives that have come out of our very specific examinations of Windsor, Ontario. The ways in which we see, experience, and move through the city [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/BCL_microresidency3-150x150.jpg "Broken City Lab: Micro-Residencies")
![To get a jump start on laying the groundwork for our upcoming How to Forget the Border Completely project, we have decided to interview a small group of individuals who may be considered “experts” of the Windsor-Detroit border in some way. Kero, a musician/graphic designer/video artist, was our first candidate for a video interview. He [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/04-copy-150x150.jpg "Border Interviews: Kero")
