Panel Discussion: What is our Urban Imaginary?
On Thursday, Justin heads up the 401 for WHAT IS OUR URBAN IMAGINARY? Thursday | December 6 | 7 – 9pm at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery Join the conversation as we consider how building design, urban spaces, and creative interventions in the city shape our collective experiences and imagination. Guest panelists include artist Justin Langlois, co-founder [...]
Panel Discussion: Intervention: Contemporary Artists in the Urban Space
If you’re in Kitchener on Saturday (or just needed an excuse to check out CAFKA.11), you should consider attending this panel discussion. Alongside Pedro Reyes and Lucy Howe, I’ll be discussing the installation at CAFKA and BCL’s practice in general in the context of urban interventions. The details: Saturday, September 24, 2011, 10:30am-12:30pm @ The [...]
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 [...]
Thinking About Borders
We’ve noted before that we’re working on a proposal for CAFKA, as we’re interested in the border between Kitchener and Waterloo. Though certainly every place is bordered with another, it’s the kind of K-W relationship that intrigues us, as we’re wondering about the potential possibilities in thinking about Windsor and Detroit as D-W. We’re wondering about examining [...]
Imagining Borders in Other Places
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 [...]
Sometimes Planning Means Drawing
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 [...]
![Broken City Lab Office Hours last night were hugely productive due, in no small part, to the many amazing people around the table last night. We completed a test with the flagging tape at Lebel (as you can see above) for the EC Row project and continued working on the LED sign. There’s lots of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_2316-150x150.jpg "Fence Text + LED Soldering")
![Friday night was especially fun. With next week being our first research report for How to Forget the Border Completely, we basically spent the evening casually going over some preliminary research, planning out some new directions, and getting more acquainted with the collection of border books next door. Michelle brought a tourism Detroit magazine she [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/IMG_8505-150x150.jpg "Quality Time with Books & Imaginary Spaces")
![I’m not sure why we didn’t start doing this earlier, but here’s the first report of our weekly activities. We’ve been meeting on Fridays for almost half the summer, trying to make, plan, and do events/projects/demos/awesome. Today involved us revisiting our seed bomb recipe, beginning the stenciling for posters for our upcoming Dance Party (details [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/Broken-City-Lab-Friday-August-22-2008-Stenciling-%2B-seed-bombs-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – August 22, 2008")
![Tuesday night’s Broken City Lab Office Hours were successful, but as usual, all too short. Spending the majority of the time in Lebel’s wood shop, we started working on our LED sign, but still have a long ways to go with it. We cut plexiglass, drilled holes, and started soldering—I think we’ll continue next Monday [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_2074-150x150.jpg "LED Sign Construction")
![I’ve been thinking about Windsor – Detroit tourism lately for our How to Forget the Border Completely project and since LivingSocial did such a good job advertising to me on facebook, I signed up for weekly Detroit deals and coupons to be e-mailed to me. I’m on week 3 or 4 and so far I’ve [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/michelledetroitdeal-150x150.jpg "Detroit Deals")
![Just little reminder if you’re in the Hamilton area… Vous invite à participer à : « Les Fables d’une Chronologie – L’atelier des Histoires de Hamilton » Développé de la recherche amassée des archives et de questionnaires présentés aux habitants de Hamilton, l’atelier Les Fables d’une Chronologie engagera ces participants à créer collectivement une histoire vaste [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/IMG_7103-150x150.jpg "The Tales of a Timeline / Les Fables d’une Chronologie")
![SRSI participants hit the street today in the blistering heat to interact with passersby. Lee Rodney’s Border Bookmobile gets re-routed, Emily Colombo serves up some lunch and fixes a few bikes. The Department of Unusual Certainties is working hard planning their Speed Dating for Store Owners event on Thursday, July 8 7pm inside of 406 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_0663-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 26 & 27: Hot Days Outside")
![The rain held off, so today was a good day to get out and do some field tests for our magnetic planters. We just stuck around the neighbourhood, but did a general test to see what surfaces were magnetic. Unfortunately, the street signs that I had anticipated being a perfect surface for these are not [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_2255-cc-150x150.jpg "Magnetic Planters: Field Test #1")
![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")
![Tuesday was all about research. We looked up some more details on ribbons and talked more about how we would move forward with the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope event. We’re also getting ready for Sunday’s event, Listen to the City (remember, 8pm at Phog), and for Thursday night’s projection performance at Propeller in Toronto. We were [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6776-150x150.jpg "Researching Ribbons, Preparing for this Week’s Events")
![Tonight, we are going to perform the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication. Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we have the equipment we need to realize this project. Cross-Border Communication was initially imagined through a collaborative effort between Broken City Lab [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_4416-150x150.jpg "Tonight, the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication")
![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")
![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")
![Josh and I spent some of the day in the heat collecting some interesting flowers and plants to transplant for our magnetic planters project. Overall, it was fairly successful, as we did learn quite a lot about transplanting, but we’re still going to be looking for some more plants to finish up this stage of [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_46142-150x150.jpg "Learning to Transplant")
![We’ve noted before that we’re working on a proposal for CAFKA, as we’re interested in the border between Kitchener and Waterloo. Though certainly every place is bordered with another, it’s the kind of K-W relationship that intrigues us, as we’re wondering about the potential possibilities in thinking about Windsor and Detroit as D-W. We’re wondering about examining [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/IMG_8680-ps-150x150.jpg "Thinking About Borders")
![As part of a Canada Council for the Arts Inter-Arts Research and Creation grant I received, I will be documenting my work on the project through here, as I anticipate it will cross over into other projects we work on and came out of past projects we’ve completed. This project comes out of Broken City [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_1669-sm-150x150.jpg "Starting New Projects: Researching the Basics of Arduino + LCDs")
![We’re doing some field tests of our magnetic planters with some plants in them. Basically, we want to test to make sure the soil isn’t drying out too quickly and we’re also checking to see how well some plants respond to transplants. Above, you can see there’s a wire around the planter that helps it [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/IMG_4829-150x150.jpg "Field Tests!")