CARTographyTO hacks Astral info pillars
Via BlogTO… Several months in the making, CARTographyTO formed through word of mouth when the first Astral Media pillars were sunk into the sidewalk in Toronto: concerned citizens, artists and others with a creative streak came together with the desire to reclaim the lost public space in their neighbourhoods. A spokesperson for cARTographyTO stated, “These structures [...]
Nail polish solution to jigsaw blade visibility troubles
The rig Kevin built has been slightly improved. We added some shims (made of styrofoam) to raise the table top and added this slick coat of red nail polish. The blade was basically disappearing when we were cutting the styrofoam, so hopefully this fixes it. Also, makes any bloodshed less conspicuous. Nice lines … thanks [...]
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’ [...]
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
Tools in Forgetting the Border
Part of our research for How to Forget the Border Completely is going to come from a lot of video. We’re not sure how many interviews we’ll do or exactly where we’ll be shooting, but we wanted to be prepared. I’ve had a Canon T2i for over a year now and it’s a very solid [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
SMS Guerilla Projector
Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London. This project, SMS Guerilla Projector, is about four years old, but it caught my eye while flipping through my copy of the Design and the [...]
Turning Crisis into Opportunity
See the Opportunity developed by Leo Burnett Lisboa and Arc Lisbon is a Firefox plugin that automatically replaces the word crisis with the word opportunity throughout your internet travels. Not unlike Steve Lambert’s Add-Art, this is another great use of the extensibility that is the Firefox plugin framework. What are those plugins written in? Does anyone [...]
Image Fulgurator
The “Image Fulgurator” by Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck senses if a camera’s flash goes off and synchronizes a projection on the object being photographed at the same time. You have to see the video, wait until the end. [via] & [via]
![It’s taken a number of weeks, but we finished wiring the LED sign at tonight’s Office Hours! It was a pretty incredible moment to plug in the sign, turn off the lights, and realize that we made this come together. I’m really, really, really happy with how it turned out!!! There are still a few [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/img_2667-150x150.jpg "The LED Sign is Finished!!!")
![Day 3 of our New York excursion and finally the day we’ve been waiting patiently for…the day of our Algorithmic Subway Adventure for ConfluxCity! In case you need a recap, The Algorithmic Subway Adventure was our attempt to psychogeographically explore, and engage with passengers of the New York City subway system. We woke up fairly [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMG_0428-150x150.jpg "Conflux Day 3 – Algorithmic Subway Adventure Recap")
![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")
![It was a bit of a quiet Sunday, but things were still happening down at SRSI. In particular, Julie and Jefferson were hard at work all day, preparing their project, “The Peoples Museum & Fabulations de Windsor.” Above, and in between visits from some neighbours and friends, Julie preps a large piece of paper for [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/IMG_9890-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 3: Quiet Sunday, but things were still happening")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9260-4-150x150.jpg "First Decisions of the Day … and notes from breakfast")
![I haven’t posted on this project for a little while, partially because of the preparation for the ongoing Save the City project, and partially because the little time that I’ve had to work on this has only resulted in small increments. So, I figured I would wait until I had some more significant updates to [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_7066-150x150.jpg "New LCDs and Serial Ports and some Max/MSP for good measure")
![I’ll be heading up to London, Ontario on Thursday, April 14 to speak on a panel with some incredible people as part of the Canadian Museum Association’s Annual Conference, appropriately titled, Evolve or Die!. I’m pumped to get to reconnect with Andrew Hunter and Andrew Lochhead, and to finally meet Yael Filipovic. Not familiar with these [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-13-at-9.24-150x150.jpg "Evolve or Die: CMA Conference")
![We spent quite a while this evening trying to perfect our tea recipe and then brewing almost 20 litres of it, in preparation of the upcoming Dance Party. In the photo above, we were in the middle of trying to figure out the best way to funnel the pots of tea into our reused (and cleaned) [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/Figuring-out-how-to-make-tea-for-the-upcoming-Dance-Party-150x150.jpg "Tea Time")
![Spent last night around the table with my brother, the high school physics teacher, trying to figure out how one might calculate the resistors and type of battery that would be needed in a circuit powering 200 LEDs. I know there are some calculators online, as Mike had suggested earlier, but because I really don’t [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/img_2048-150x150.jpg "Learning Electricity")
![Text In-Transit is a Broken City Lab project where we’re partnering with Transit Windsor to install a number of text-based creative works amongst the ads in the headspace on buses. We’re looking for submissions of short statements, poems, and stories from anyone in the city that will help to change the conversation about Windsor!!! *** Please send your submission(s) [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/textintransit-callforsubmissions-bg-150x150.jpg "Text In-Transit: Call For Submissions")
![I stopped by the Ecohouse today (where our collective studio is housed) to check out one of our new neighbours — The Border Bookmobile Winter Reading Room. Collected and curated by Border Bookmobile founder, Lee Rodney, the books assembled as part of the winter reading room are going to be incredible helpful for our upcoming [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/IMG_5136-150x150.jpg "Anxious to Explore the Border Bookmobile’s Winter Reading Room")
![Though we have a lot more to say about Save the City than I’ll attempt right now, you should know that we put together a toolkit that describes the processes we figured out throughout the last five months. We put together a nice one-page fold up list of instructions, so to speak, for how one [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_9640-150x150.jpg "A Toolkit for Saving a City")
![We spent Friday night in Hamilton at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre as part of their Labour Lounge series (organized by once-Windsorite, Andrew Lochhead). In a little less than two hours, we led a workshop and explosion of creativity with some amazingly great 13-year-olds. We made banners, two really great banners that will be [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_5675-150x150.jpg "Making Banners at the Labour Lounge")
![We’ve been quiet on the blog, but not because we haven’t been busy. I’ve been working away at the final touches for the maps for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope, which while taking longer than I had anticipated, was well worth it. The map looks great, we’ll be posting it on here soon [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/IMG_3153-150x150.jpg "Mid-August: Maps, Writing & Cardboard")
![We’re in week 3 of this LED sign project, and we now know how to finish it up. We had previously soldered all the anodes on the LEDs, but we were a bit confused about the connections of the cathodes and resistors. As we had been working off of a MAKE video, which breezed over [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/dsc_1920-150x150.jpg "We Learned Electricity!")
![On Monday, Norman Eberstein patrolled the alley, The Department of Unusual Certainties decorated their office and did some brainstorming, Thea Jones and Stephen Surlin moved in. Simon’s return to Windsor brought a lot of activity to the back of 410, where Chris had been sitting at his desk for a few days prior. The workspace [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_0783-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 11: Norman’s Crush and Getting Organized")
![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")