By Justin on March 8th, 2010, 8:00 am 0 Comments

The details: Saturday, March 20th at 3pm, meet at the corner of University and Pelissier.

As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, and to better understand the city and its rich and failed history, Broken City Lab researchers will invite the community to learn the Francophone history of Windsor through a collective performance and storytelling of traditional French Folk Songs native to the Detroit River region on Saturday, March 20th at 3pm.

Led by Dr Marcel Beneteau, a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at the University of Sudbury, participants will meet at University Avenue and Pelissier Street to take part in a walking oral history tour and performance, which will stop at the streets along Riverside Drive named after Windsor’s French settlers such as Goyeau, Langlois, Marentette, Louis, Parent and Pierre.

The retelling of the brief oral history at each street will be followed by a collective open performance of the French Folk song led by the local Francophone musician. Video and audio documentation of the performances will subsequently be made available on the Broken City Lab / Save the City website.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Tagged: BCL folklore Francophone history parade research Save the City songs Windsor

By Justin on January 25th, 2010, 11:54 pm 8 Comments

Sunday night was the first event of our Save the City project: Listen to the City, and it was incredible!!! We had an amazingly generous crowd of old friends and new faces come out to share their stories of Windsor with us and we recorded close to 8 hours of their hopes, concerns, and personal histories of the city.

We’ll be going through all of this material over the next little while to turn it into an audio documentary that we’ll distribute online, hopefully on some local airwaves, and also through a contribution of the final work to the Windsor Archives. We’re hoping that this documentary will serve as a marker in time that will have captured a very specific kind of conversation happening right now, and maybe happening for the first time. It’s going to be something very special.

We want to thank everyone who came out and participated — this literally could not have been possible without you! There’s a number of photos and some overview of the discussions after the jump of what was our absolute most favourite night of the year so far.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL community history participation research Save the City stories Windsor

By Justin on August 17th, 2009, 3:39 pm 0 Comments

Sascha Pohflepp imagined a future predicated on the re-election of Jimmy Carter in 1980. In this future, there exists a think tank called, “The Golden Institute for Energy” based in Golden, Colarado, which imagines and invents new technologies to make the US the most energy-rich nation on the planet.

Capturing lightning, stealing back energy from off-ramps, and weather modification balloons are all imagined as feasible energy-generating technologies. The institute, or rather the idea of the institute, becomes a vehicle for creative and critical thought and invention, and it is more about that idea than the computer-generated images, scale models, or fake corporate videos that make Pohflepp’s project so interesting.

Rewriting and re-imagining something as huge as a national energy policy could certainly appear reckless or hopeless, but it should instead be read as hugely exciting and filled with potential. Inventing an entirely new trajectory for something so large (like say, the city of Windsor) could indeed facilitate a crucially important discussion: in the instance of Pohflepp’s project, how different would the world’s stance on climate change be if Carter had been re-elected; in the instance of imagining the future of Windsor, how bad will things get if nothing changes.

[via We Make Money Not Art]

Tagged: context energy green history imagination rewrite

By Justin on July 20th, 2009, 11:21 pm 0 Comments

Kind of strangely, I read about this project in the New Yorker and momentarily confused it with Canada’s Tree Museum, but ultimately thought it was worth noting given a recent conversation we had with Edwin who came by our Office Hours last week about a potential audio-based community project.

The video above describing the Holten’s project is kind of brutal (especially the soundtrack), but it gives a good idea of the way it works—acting as a kind of series of stops on a museum tour, with a variety of trees being the markers in each neighbourhood.

100 trees give voice to 100 perspectives featured in the Grand Concourse’s TREE MUSEUM. Irish artist Katie Holten created this public art project to celebrate the communities and ecosystems along this 100 year-old boulevard. Visitors can listen in on local stories and the intimate lives of trees offered by current and former residents: from beekeepers to rappers, historians to gardeners, school kids to scientists.

You can call 718-408-2501to access the audio guide.

Tagged: cellphone context history museum New York public art story tree

By Justin on July 4th, 2009, 2:05 pm 5 Comments

A year ago today, the first post was made on BrokenCityLab.org - Broken City Lab is Alive.

Last night, Josh and I went for a walk and we thought, for a moment, we were in a real city. On our walk, we saw that there were people out walking, riding bicycles, enjoying the view alongside meadows and wildflower gardens, the downtown streets were shutdown and open to pedestrians to walk and sit outside of bars and restaurants without the traffic. For a few hours last night, the city didn’t seem quite so broken.

The post that I made a year ago had a picture that, for me, kind of summarized the general sense of the city for a lot of people. I’m not sure that anything has changed, and in all likelihood, things are worse than ever, but last night I had a feeling of hope for the city that I haven’t felt for a while.

Tagged: BCL Blog history Windsor

By Justin on July 1st, 2009, 12:57 am 0 Comments

Stephen Willats worked in relation aesthetics when Nicolas Bourriaud was 15. Willats worked has often involved a collaborative process, where he engages with residents of public housing units for projects that can span years.

I’ve been re-reading Conversation Pieces by Grant H. Kester, spending some considerable time on the section about Willats. Kester frames Willats’ work around the processes embedded in the work, which often attempts to examine the potential for his collaborative partners exercising autonomy from the places in which they’re situated.

The problematic of the artist acting in the position that Willats often occupies, that is, in the position of coming into a socially or politically difficult situation from the outside and working to uncover things for the people who have lived those situations for much longer, is something to consider when working within a community as we do. This practice of course forces questions about the artist as a social worker. However, our interaction with a specific community has been somewhat limited (and on purpose). We’ve been able to maintain a level of activity based on our concerns and our experiences, which is empowering, but also potentially limiting, and yet I’m nervous to think about what it would mean to try to work more directly with other communities in the city.

I believe that there is a lot of room to work with communities in Windsor, but my hesitation to attempt to work in this mode of choosing a group to work with, and then creating a project around their concerns (or worse, our preconceived ideas of their concerns) isn’t necessarily relieved by looking at Willats’ work (and not that it has to be). I think his work is worth noting though, as it certainly made possible what it is we’re doing today.

Pictured above, “Around the Networks” by Stephen Willats from January 2002.

Tagged: community context history networks social practice

By Justin on March 2nd, 2009, 10:33 pm 2 Comments

This Thursday, March 5th we’ll be in the basement of Lambton Tower: Studio A to remix / rewrite Windsor’s history. We’ll be remixing visuals and sounds from Windsor’s history, but also looking to collaboratively and collectively write a personal / fictional / “what you can remember” history of Windsor, which we’ll later publish as a book with everyone in attendance as a co-author.

The event is free and starts at 7:30pm sharp. Presented as part of NoiseBorder.

Tagged: BCL history lambton tower multimedia noiseborder Windsor

By Justin on November 21st, 2008, 9:38 am 3 Comments

In a post on MAKE about how to embed 720p videos from YouTube, I found this great, short video about the history of LEDs and some quick notes at the end about the simplest way to make them work. I’m on the case of looking into getting a bulk order of LEDs from DigiKey.

Oh, and to embed 720p video (when available) add this to the embed source &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 or add this to the url just to watch a video on the YouTube page in 720p &fmt=22 … adding &fmt=18 will make any video play in high-quality h264 encoding.

Tagged: history how to LED make youtube