Urban Ecology Workshops at CIVIC SPACE with Sam Lefort
We’re really excited to announce our first Artist-in-Residence at CIVIC SPACE, Samantha Lefort with the Urban Ecology Project! Evolved from a love of design, urban environments, and creative projects – The Urban Ecology Project is the interjection of ecology and new life into an urban space. It kicks off on Tuesday, July 24 for a week of workshops. Urban [...]
Tactical Gardening Workshop in Guelph
Danielle, Rosina, Michelle, and I were up in Guelph over the weekend as part of the Kazoo festival, leading a workshop on making those magnetic planters we were working on last summer . The workshop was a lot of fun and I thought I’d post a few photos of some of the more abitious designs [...]
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 [...]
Futurefarmers: Cultivating Consciousness Since 1995
Amy Franceschini of San Francisco, is a contemporary American artist and designer who’s practices span from drawing, painting, sculpture, design, net art, public art and gardening. She teaches media theory and practice courses at both Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute. In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers as a way to bring together multidisciplinary art [...]
Victory Gardens
Victory Gardens is a new project by Amy Franceschini. The project recalls the WWII victory gardens project that encouraged citizens to grow their own food as a tactic to keep them calm over the war and support their troops. Franceschini, the daughter of an organic farmer and an industrial farmer, takes the project back to [...]
Mossenger by Anna Garforth
Anna Garforth is a designer and illustrator by trade, but has been working with environmentally themed public and community artworks as of late. Along with working with moss graffiti inMossenger, Garforth is also engaging in creating planters made by recycling milk containers in a project entitled Head Gardener, and then leading workshops to teach elementary school students [...]
Seed Bomb Research Party
The members of Broken City Lab will be holding a research session on Friday August 1st on perfecting a Seed Bomb recipe. Check back when we post our findings!
![Justin couldn’t stay too long today since he had to leave for a Media City engagement. So he set us up with the things we would need then left us alone. He was showing Josh how the new design I started last week held up better and works with the magnets better too. The previously-made [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/img_5245-150x150.jpg "Planters – Take 2")
![Danielle and I went over to Detroit yesterday to meet with Aaron Timlin (from the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit) at the LadyBug Gallery to discuss some potential collaborative projects over the summer. After getting a quick tour of the gallery and some of the other studios and workspaces in the building (which we unfortunately didn’t get [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/img_2819-150x150.jpg "Visiting Detroit")
![For one of my last projects with Sigi Torinus as part of my BFA degree I made an iphone App. I was able to speed up a usually lengthy process by skipping over the coding portion of creating the app. This was made possible by using Buzztouch, a web-based content management software (CMS) out of Montery California [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/citynoisepresents_blog-150x150.jpg "I made an iPhone App and so can you !!!")
![Over three days this week, we got a lot done. And, as I write this, stuff is still getting done. This is why collaboration is such a valuable model for art practice. But, it’s not just about getting stuff done, it’s the challenges, the insights, the novel perspectives that can be brought up around a [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9628-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: End of April, 2011 (the Art of Planning & Collaboration)")
![It was Monday night and Karlyn’s Birthday, so Hiba and Kevin brought a fun cake. Other things happened as well, and strangely, or maybe expectedly, now that the semester’s done and since we didn’t meet at the very end of the week, we had a marathon five hour meeting. It was so great!!! We had [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9446-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 11, 2011 (oh, the logistics)")
![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")
![I’ve been mulling over some potential designs (the 8.5×11 pictured above is just one sketch of an idea) for the promo for our upcoming Broken City Lab: Save The City project, which will start at the very end of January, 2010. There’s still much to finalize, in terms of dates and locations, and we’ll need [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_5849-sm2-150x150.jpg "Designing Promo for “Save The City”")
![As part of our Extended Field Trip #001, we’re in Peterborough staying at the artist-run-centre, Artspace. We’re hoping to conduct some intercity research where we’ll attempt to understand the similarities and differences between Peterborough and Windsor and hopefully find some intersection thereof to which we can respond. We arrived in Peterborough in the late afternoon [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_2617-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip Day 1: Stable City")
![Lee Rodney teaches one of the best courses at the University of Windsor, Border Culture. I took the course in the fall of 2010 and wrote a book: The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor. The book serves as documentation and comparative analysis of three specific forgotten spaces in downtown Windsor, Ontario, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cuts-150x150.jpg "The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro")
![Yesterday afternoon, Eric Boucher came to the School of Visual Arts to interview my friend and fellow Windsor-based artist, Lucy Howe, for his ongoing Micro-Residency with Broken City Lab. Each BCL fellow will be introducing Eric to a person whom he has never met. Eric then will be interviewing each person exclusively on the topic of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_5707-150x150.jpg "Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 2/5")
![Well, our strawberry-thyme-apple jam slow cooked overnight, but it’s now ready, and we’ve jarred it and added the labels from last night’s All Tomorrow’s Preserves workshop. Special thanks to Jen Delos Reyes for walking us through the wonders of jam making and Fallen Fruit for the tasty idea. Next week, All Tomorrow’s Problems returns as [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/wpid22625-IMG_2936-150x150.jpg "All Tomorrow’s Preserves: It’s about thyme!")
![The rain held off, so today was a good day to get out and do some field tests for our magnetic planters. We just stuck around the neighbourhood, but did a general test to see what surfaces were magnetic. Unfortunately, the street signs that I had anticipated being a perfect surface for these are not [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_2255-cc-150x150.jpg "Magnetic Planters: Field Test #1")
![Whether making your own guerrilla celebration, working on a gallery installation, or even getting ready for some upcoming holiday festivities, we think our little automagic bunting app will make everything a little bit easier. We got tired of hand-setting each letter when we’ve made bunting in the past, so we cooked up this simple little web app that [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/makebunting-150x150.jpg "Micro-Project: Make Your Own Bunting (Web App)")
![Thursday was the Storefront Success Stories Speed Dating for Store Owners event down on Pelissier for SRSI, and Justin set up a window installation using the Arduino. Using the same format as the text on the billboards running in Windsor until July 15th as part of the conclusion of Save The City, The Arduino in [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_1618-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 28: Speed Dating for Store Owners")
![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")
![Mondays always seem to be the best studio days. Maybe it’s because the weight of the week hasn’t set in, or that the last Thursday is just far enough away that we’re motivated to try to get more work done. Whatever it is, yesterday was a particularly good example of getting things done at CIVIC [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/wpid20679-IMG_3069-150x150.jpg "Monday in the Studio: Rubber, Plaques, T-shirts")
![Starting on January 15, 2013, we’ll be offering a new workshop series for anyone and everyone interested in learning about electronics and physical computing. Hosted by Paul Anderson – a man of too many hobbies who holds the advanced qualification for ham radio in Canada, and has been working with electronics on and off since childhood [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BEDO-POSTER-150x150.jpg "New Workshop Series Starting in January: Building Electronics / Designing Originally")
![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")