Evan Roth’s Art & Hacking Class
Danielle, Michelle and I were over in Detroit at the recent INITIATE panel discussion and Evan Roth made a presentation on the early stages of some of this work. It’s awesome to see where it went — hopefully we’ll have a chance to head over and check out the show. Here’s the details from Roths’ [...]
Here Comes the Neighborhood
I dream daily about a colourful, messy, city as this one.
For the amount of dead space that lies between places, there should be something to pull people in and make them walk by and engage in something, even if it’s only momentarily.
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
Street Art vs Graffiti
Choose your words carefully. Street Artist vs Graffiti Writer by Lush. via Today and Tomorrow
Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’
Ceyetano Ferrer, City of Chicago (Iowa #2), 2006 Street artist Ceyetano Ferrer specializes in blending urban objects into their environments by painting layers over them in a way that makes them seem transparent. Ferrer uses photo stickers on public objects like street signs, boxes and billboards and camouflages them to create an illusion of the objects [...]
Roadsworth: Painting the City
Life Support System by Roadsworth Reading about a show up at Atelier Punkt, featuring work by Roadsworth, I was interested in the gestures that transform an infrastructure that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Working with road paint, the street artist, Roadsworth, plays with the existing roadway communication to transform straight lines into heartbeats, [...]
A Love Letter to Syracuse
COLAB and Syracuse University brought Steven Powers to Syracuse to work on a project similar to his efforts in Philadelphia, A Love Letter For You, aimed at transforming some railway overpasses that literally divide the community. After having a number of discussions with the community, Powers selected from a series of things that residents loved [...]
Reverse Graffiti in South Africa
We’ve tossed around the idea of engaging in some form of reverse graffiti in Windsor for quite a while now. I assume there must be a few Windsor buildings dirty enough for a nice contrast-heavy design. Any suggestions? I think the Hiram Walker storage facilities near Russel Woods are covered with a black residue, but [...]
Urban Interventions by OX
OX works on billboards across Paris, France to disrupt perspectives, commercial aesthetics, and daily encounters with forever-scaling urban signage. The artist has sent us a few emails in the past, so I’m happy to finally be able to post about it. You should check out OX’s site featuring a huge number of works and on [...]
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 [...]
![I spent the better part of the day on Saturday doing some more basic research into connecting an Arduino and LCD for this ongoing project. For the most part, it’s pretty basic and following the wiring diagrams and tutorials online is fine. I ran into a problem with getting text on two lines, which I’ll [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6480-150x150.jpg "Getting Things to Talk: Arduino + LCDs")
![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")
![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")
![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)")
![We spent the better part of Day 2 of our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at the wonderful Artspace talking to some new people, synthesizing some questions from our broad understanding of the city so far, and trying to get a sense of what if anything there is to change about this place. We [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_3499-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip Day 2: Mapping")
![300′ of bright orange flagging tape, $5.97 + tax. It’s fairly thin, but should be really easy to work with. We might have to double it up to make it visible on the fence, that is, double the width of each letter. We should test at Lebel later this week, or maybe on Monday before [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_1697-150x150.jpg "Flagging Tape")
![TODAY is the last day to submit to the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation. If you’ve already submitted, rest-assured that we have received your proposal. We’ll be sending out one big email to acknowledge all submissions sometime tomorrow and then we’ll proceed to go through all of them and narrow them down hopefully within a [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/SRSI-11x17-3-520px-rgb-150x150.jpg "SRSI Call for Submissions Closes Today!")
![I’m starting a new project in creating a series of iPhone applications for Surviving Windsor. Some of these applications will be absurd, some useful, but all will be focused primarily on the specific conditions and realities found here in South Detroit. This suite of applications takes the city as its conceptual backing, generating a set of small [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3934-150x150.jpg "iPhone app development (on paper)")
![Last night out a window in the county, the new projector at night. Today, finishing our list of 100 ways to save the city. It’s going to run as a presentation in Keynote, the easiest failsafe solution. Though, we might try to open it up on Twitter somehow later tonight. And, speaking of tonight, the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_5327-150x150.jpg "Prepping for FAM Fest Projection")
![We spent last night watching a rough cut of some of Eric’s ongoing micro-residency project, did a lot of measuring, used Google Earth, did some math, drew some diagrams, and brainstormed a new project (because Cristina wants to sew, a lot). With the semester basically over now, we’re hoping to wrap up a couple things [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_6230-150x150.jpg "Math, Markers, and Measurements + Eric’s micro-documentary")
![Broken City Lab is heading up to Peterborough, Ontario for all of next week (October 12 – 17, 2009) for an extended field trip to collaborate with Artspace for a series of community and inter-city research initiatives, workshops, and interventions to understand the city of Peterborough, its infrastructures, and its communities. We’ll be blogging extensively [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/peterboroughmap3-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip #001: Artspace in Peterborough")
![We made a lot of progress tonight, not only getting a considerable way through the first coat of red paint, but also testing a variety of techniques for applying the retroreflective glass beads! We also got to spend some time talking through how we’ll be temporarily installing the letters in a variety of spaces. We [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_4441-150x150.jpg "Red Paint & Testing Glass Beads")
![On Thursday night, on what was supposed to be a test run for projecting on the side of the Jackman Building (the new drama building at the University of Windsor), Broken City Lab ended up exploring a number of locations on campus armed with a projector, a laptop, and a really long extension cord. Originally, we [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Broken-City-Lab-is-on-the-wall-of-the-new-drama-building-at-the-University-of-Windsor-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – Oct 9, 2008")
![It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts — a kind of summary of some of the things I’ve been working on. It seemed about time. I like posting as a sort of summary for myself, but maybe it’s interesting for my dearest BCL colleagues to see what I’ve been up to [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_6450-150x150.jpg "Research Update (some things I’ve been working on the last couple of days)")
![It’s been a busy last week, getting back from Victoria, and launching the Text In-Transit Call For Submissions, but we still had time to meet for our weekly Office Hours and continue working with the Massey Physics Club. Our adventures in paper making for an upcoming planters project we have in mind, and in learning [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_3378-150x150.jpg "Physics Club + Making Paper")
![Yesterday was the second day of our Making Things Happen (For a Week Straight) show—where we worked in the gallery and travelled to Vincent Massey secondary school to start working with some physics students on another large-scale project we’re planning. We also worked a bit more on the hanging baskets and planned for Thursday’s event. Danielle [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_9449-150x150.jpg "Making Things Happen, Day 2")
![I saw an ad for CCA‘s Actions: What You Can Do With the City exhibition in the current issue of Border Crossings and the title got the best of me. I quickly flipped through the rest of the magazine, then went about exploring the Tools for Actions website. On the site, you’ll find 99 actions, ranging from [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/picture-7-150x150.png "Tools for Actions")
![We met to do another round of projection tests, this time outside. While we still only had two projectors to work with for the test, we definitely verified an increase in brightness on outdoor surfaces (both with ambient light and without), though this increase is not equal to the amount of light we’re throwing at [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMG_9933-150x150.jpg "Projector Tests: Day 2 of 2")
![HOMEWORK: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively-written publication aimed at generating conversation around the following: alternative infrastructures, radical collaboration, social practice, art implicated in social change, neighbourhood-level activities, city-wide imaginations, site-specific curiosities, tactical resistance, new models for art education and research. Facilitated by Broken City Lab, HOMEWORK calls on artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/register1-150x150.jpg "Attending Homework is Free!")
![Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden. Cristina’s finally back from Italy, it was awesome to catch up and [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_9407-150x150.jpg "Magnetic Planters Finished!")