New Exhibition: Unrest Everywhere (Tools for Playing with Halifax)
Just back from an incredible week installing at Eye Level Gallery for our show, Unrest Everywhere (tools for playing with Halifax), which runs until May 12, 2012. The show features a number of multiples and interactive works, all of which are yours for the taking and borrowing. The premise for the show was to create [...]
Hi, 5 with David Spriggs
About the Hi, 5 Interview Series Hi, 5 (5 Questions) is a web-only interview series which presents five questions to artists, activists, and creative thinkers alike. The project acts as an educational device which allows us to gain insight into the narratives that define successful individuals. We are interested in the motivations behind ambitious ideas and [...]
Martha Street Studio Residency Day 3: Install & Exhibition
A quick three days at Martha Street Studio finished up with the opening for our exhibition, All the Stories We’re Not Telling About Winnipeg. The show features a series of posters made by participants from our workshops and created in response to the stories they collectively wrote. The exhibition runs until January 5, 2012! We have [...]
Two Tales of a City: Hamilton
This week, Rosina and I spent two days in Hamilton researching for our upcoming project at Hamilton Artist’s Inc. Two Tales of a City will uncover, celebrate, and imagine a future for lost histories of Steel City.
CAKFA.11: Reflect on Here
After months and months of work, we finally installed our project for CAFKA.11. Led by Josh, Hiba, Kevin, and myself, the project took an incredible amount of research and build time, but we were incredibly excited to see our efforts finally in place in front of Kitchener’s City Hall when we wrapped up the installation [...]
Urban Stargazing
Here’s a project which is particularly interesting for its subtlety. Designer Oscar Lhermitte created twelve groups of artificial stars and added them to the night sky of London, titling the project Urban Stargazing. Oscar and his team installed a group of lights on thin transparent lines. These lines were then anchored to nearby structures. I find [...]
Dynamite Wildflower Guerillas
Guerilla gardener(s) started a website documenting their efforts. It’s simple and makes me very ready to embrace the impending summer. They write: throw sseeds some of them take some dont take some grow then somebody cut it down the bastards. why would someone cut it down i dont know. if it rains too much the [...]
BCL Report: End of April, 2011 (the Art of Planning & Collaboration)
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 [...]
Pablo Valbuena’s Quadratura
Quadratura is a new site-specific light installation by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena. He projected a perspective grid between two rows of columns and onto the wall behind them, thus creating the illusion of an infinite pathway. Pablo reminds us that “Quadratura was the technique used in the baroque to extended architecture through trompe l’oeil and [...]
Double Happiness
Here is a magnificent use of billboard space created by architect Didier Faustino. He has titled the work/installation/swing-set Double Happiness for pretty obvious reasons. Clever ideas like this usually don’t come from passivity towards the city, but an engaged, analytical, and curious attitude. I found this summary of the conceptual framework behind the project: “Double [...]
![SCAVENGE THE CITY: An Algorithmic Walk with Broken City Lab is happening on Sunday, March 29th at 6pm. Starting at Phog Lounge, we’ll be handing out a custom algorithm (a set of instructions), using a fancy computer program that we write, to take you and whomever you want to walk with, around the downtownish area [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/scavengethecityposter-v1-150x150.jpg "Scavenge The City")
![Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on making blocks of ice with letters and text embedded in them to create temporary street art. I think this idea came out of working with wheat paste, realizing the enjoyment of working in public spaces, and wanting to continue to work throughout the winter. I [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/img_2448-150x150.jpg "How to: Text on Ice")
![Friday night meetings have been hard to pull together over the last little while. Managing to fit together six different schedules can seem next to impossible sometimes, so it’s all the more fun when we can actually pull it off and all be in the same room at the same time. We caught up on [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8008-150x150.jpg "Imagining Borders in Other Places")
![The details: Sunday, January 24, 2010 (8pm) at Phog Lounge (157 University Ave W, Windsor) As part of the Broken City Lab: Save the City project, Broken City Lab researchers will facilitate a community workshop to brainstorm, uncover, and share personal histories of Windsor, inviting a range of community members to participate in the process. The workshop [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/BCL-STC-Jan-5x7-front-outlines-1024-150x150.jpg "Save the City: Listen to 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")
![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 Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation invites the radical re-imagining of the possibilities for economic stimulus and process-driven practice, situating those very possibilities in the heart of Windsor in vacant storefronts. Facilitated by Broken City Lab, the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation will call on artists, writers, designers, entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, hobby shops, restauranteurs, librarians, musicians, architects, archivists, and other [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/SRSI-11x17-3-520px-rgb-150x150.jpg "Call for Proposals: The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation")
![Justin has some process shots, and those will probably be posted at some point, but I figured I’d go ahead and share the product of five or so hours of ironing inside-out plastic grocery bags. So far, I’ve made some envelopes, a box, and some random swatches to see if leftover scaps can be fused [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/bags2-150x150.jpg "Fusing bags")
![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")
![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 got up early and headed down to the EC Row pedestrian overpass between the Dominion and Huron Church exits to install YOU ARE AMAZING! It’s hard to describe what it felt like to do this—taking on this project gave us all a genuine excitement about participating in changing a part of Windsor and the way [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_1471-150x150.jpg "Installing YOU ARE AMAZING")
![On Thursday, January 21st at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto, we’ll be doing a projection performance that examines the language and ideas surrounding public space, intervention, urban surfaces, and city infrastructures. As part of Propeller’s Public Realm exhibition, we will curate a text-based list of ideas, statements, and questions, that address the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/propellerinvite-150x150.jpg "Public Realm at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts")
![Monday night we spent a couple hours working over some new ideas with some new friends. Mostly, these ideas have been in the “meaning to do that” category, mostly opening up new collaborations in which new projects will unfold. Two main project frameworks came out of our brainstorm session—a floating sculpture project with the Green [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_5402-150x150.jpg "New Project Mondays: Week 1")
![Today, a very brief summary of some things that I’ve been thinking about and noted over the last few weeks… Above, a portal. Perhaps a cross-border portal. An under-used, long forgotten relic of a portal prototype. Cordoned off, waiting for a new route. Partington and Wyandotte on our side, where’s the related neighbourhood in Detroit? [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/portals-150x150.jpg "A Summary of Things I’ve Been Thinking About")
![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")
![After various discussions over the break regarding the next steps in preparing our giant banner for the upcoming project in Hamilton, I went ahead and did some experimenting with image transfers onto fabric. I took direction from a handy post here, which included simple directions and very few ingredients. With a simple picture printed [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_6470-150x150.jpg "Fabric Transfers and Letter Tracing: More Preparations for Two Tales of A City")
![My work on this ongoing LCD Arduino project has been continuing over the last couple of weeks, I just haven’t had the time to update appropriately. So, I switched over my plan of attack from Processing to PHP. I figured this made sense for a couple reasons: first, I’m already very well-acquainted with PHP, I’ve [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_7140-150x150.jpg "More Arduino + LCD + PHP fun")
![Wednesday was a big day in the SRSI spaces. Lea Bucknell held her Garden Party in 424 unveiling the portraits and stories that she made of Windsor residents, ProClick Factory arrives from Toronto, Thom Provost and Josh Babcock work on some hand-drawn diagrams. Robin Fitzsimons has been training hard every day in the window spaces [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_0906-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 20: Garden Party!!!")
![Meeting twice in a week can make such a difference in terms of how much we can get done. We’re still in the thick of planning for the first event of Save the City. We met earlier last week to go over the basics of finalizing our adjusted budget, put together the first round of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6407-150x150.jpg "How We Spend Friday Nights: Planning, Writing, and Mapping")