Initiate! Open Frameworks Detroit
I’ll be presenting Broken City Lab at: Initiate! Technology + Collaboration + Community + Change Saturday, 2/25, 5-9:30 PM Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit 4454 Woodward Ave Detroit MI, 48201 Looking forward to a great discussion on creative uses of primarily open source technology and open source approaches to creating art and social change with a bunch of [...]
![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")
![We’re hosting an algorithmic adventure to get to know our new neighbourhood. This adventure will be a psychogeographic walk of sorts starting at Broken City Lab Headquarters, which will take participants around the campus, student ghettos, the sculpture garden, Indian Road, and all of the little things that make this area worth exploring. Everyone who shows [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/welcometotheneighbourhood-150x150.jpg "Welcome to the Neighbourhood")
![This is part of an ongoing set of one-question emails sent to people we know, or would like to get to know, about things that interest us and inform our collective practice. They’ll be featured on the site weekly, usually on Fridays. These questions are more about unfolding ideas than about the people we’re asking, but we do [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/suebellyank3-150x150.jpg "Sue Bell Yank on Art and Social Practice")
![We played catch up on How to Forget the Border Completely on Friday night. We invented new consultancies, planned interviews and events, and came up with new tactics for forgetting a border completely. It was much needed and so much fun!!! While Danielle hides behind her hand… She was also busy inventing these crazy contraptions [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BORDERCONSULTANCY-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 1, 2011 (Forgetting the Border)")
![The new model for our Magnetic Planters—basically just using a paper mache technique. Darren figured this one out, and after some testing, it looks like this is the strongest and easiest planter we can make! We did more research last Friday to get to this point, but we’re happy to have come up with a really [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/img_4303-150x150.jpg "New Design for the Planters")
![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")
![While we’re still moving along on our Save the City project in the background, we’re also continuing to look ahead to other projects and deadlines coming up. Tuesday mornings are always a really good productive time, and this week was no exception. While we wait for our ribbons and postcards to arrive for the upcoming Sites of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_7135-150x150.jpg "Sometimes Planning Means Drawing")
![In preparation for Art’s 1,000,046 Birthday Celebration this Saturday, January 17, 2009 at Phog (starts at 8:30pm, $3 for students and unemployed and Artcite members, $4 for everyone else), we spent Sunday evening making Broken City Lab fortune cookies from scratch. There’s lots of pictures of our adventures in baking after the jump. The process of making [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_1964-150x150.jpg "Making Fortune Cookies")
![In preparation for our upcoming contribution to the We Like Music Festival happening at The Magic Stick in Detroit, we are brainstorming a running list of reasons why we like Detroit. This blog post will be the spot where we can bounce ideas back and fourth through comments to use in our projection of text [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MajesticTheaterDetroit-150x150.jpg "Reasons Why We Love Detroit")
![Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?” We’ll be [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/openengagement-150x150.jpg "Open Engagement, Group Work: The Collective Impetus")
![The panels for Text In-Transit have been sent off to the printers. We should be able to install these on Transit Windsor buses in the next couple of weeks!!! We settled on 90 unique panels + 10 title card panels. Again, we can’t thank everyone enough for the support and participation—I’m hugely excited to see [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/textintransit-folder-150x150.jpg "Text In-Transit Panels off to the Printers")
![We’re in the preparation stages for an upcoming project called Civic Maintenance. The project will be based around the writing and distributing of a thousand letters (give or take) to residents of Windsor, thanking them for staying in the city, or contributing to it, or somehow having an impact on it, or maybe all of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/wpid19626-IMG_1200-150x150.jpg "Mailbox Prototypes and Organizational Systems for Civic Maintenance")
![Monday night we met with some new friends from Detroit and had an amazingly good conversation about some of the very specific differences between our two cities. Maybe unsurprisingly, much of what we perceive about each other’s cities isn’t entirely correct, and it is exactly those strange assumptions about these two border cities that continue [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_5195-150x150.jpg "The International Hyper-local Exchange")
![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”")
![From yesterday afternoon — testing the stamp that Rosina set up and the cards we just got back from the printers. We also got a fun package from Hamilton Artist Inc. that included some of the “questionnaires” we did from the last art crawl. These will eventually make their way into our forthcoming publication. Detail, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9738-150x150.jpg "Letter Library Card & Stamp Test, Example, etc.")