Building a Wooden Test-Letter
Back in 2010 we conceptualized numerous iterations of Kitchener-Waterloo border installations for Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area (CAFKA). We decided on an ambitious wooden installation which will sit in a shallow pond at the city hall nearby. Our text installation, which will read REFLECT ON HERE, will need some thorough planning. For this reason, [...]
Constructing a City of Boxes
After a long day of classes and studying, a few friends of mine wandered into the Lebel gallery to let loose and make ridiculous things out of heaps of cardboard boxes. The creating of the ‘box city’ was open to anyone curious enough to take part. Of course the essentials (boxes, scissors, coloured tape, paint [...]
Make It Work: Exhibition & Panel Discussion
I’m excited to note that in addition to the current exhibition, Make It Work, on at SoVA Projects Gallery (nee LeBel Gallery) featuring work by Michelle, a new poster installation that I did, and a ton of other incredible local Windsor-Detroit artists, there’s a panel discussion featuring guests from across the country. If you’re remotely [...]
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours return on Tuesday, July 14th, at 2pm, at 406 Pelissier. Come play with us. We’ll be working on some ongoing projects and starting to plan for the fall!
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, June 5th at 2:30pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll be going on a brief field trip to the downtown space and continuing work on the planters.
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, May 29th, at 2:30pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll finish up some projects and brainstorm some others. If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments!
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours on Friday, May 22, at 2:30pm in LeBel, room 125. We’ll be finishing up the planters and planning for our downtown space in June. See you there!
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours will continue throughout the summer, just on a different schedule. I’m teaching a section of the Green Corridor running through Intersession, and a number of other BCL members are taking other Intersession courses, which happen to fall on Tuesday and Thursday nights. So, we won’t be holding Office Hours this [...]
Planters Nearing Completion
The Magnetic Planters project continues. With Michelle and Danielle away this week, the rest of Broken City Lab had to relearn the process of making paper pulp. It was a good night, though we’re hoping to get this project finished in the next week or so. As Intersession begins, we’ll be shifting our Office Hours [...]
Office Hours
Broken City Lab office hours on Tuesday, May 5th, at 7pm, LeBel, room 125. We’ll continue work on our magnetic planters and planning for the summer! If anyone has anything they want on the agenda, feel free to add it in the comments…
![Whether making your own guerrilla celebration, working on a gallery installation, or even getting ready for some upcoming holiday festivities, we think our little automagic bunting app will make everything a little bit easier. We got tired of hand-setting each letter when we’ve made bunting in the past, so we cooked up this simple little web app that [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/makebunting-150x150.jpg "Micro-Project: Make Your Own Bunting (Web App)")
![We met to do another round of projection tests, this time outside. While we still only had two projectors to work with for the test, we definitely verified an increase in brightness on outdoor surfaces (both with ambient light and without), though this increase is not equal to the amount of light we’re throwing at [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMG_9933-150x150.jpg "Projector Tests: Day 2 of 2")
![The Save the City project aims to create a concentrated series of positive community-based activities facilitated by Broken City Lab in collaboration with community members. The project will address a number of issues and ideas specific to Windsor, Ontario through various collaborative community-based activities. As Windsor is situated in precarious economic, cultural, and geographic positions, the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/BCL-STC-Jan-5x7-back-website-green-150x150.jpg "Save the City: an overview")
![These are early days for a spontaneous new project, but here’s how we’re starting. Rosina, Hiba, and I met on Friday and after going through our usual to-do list, we started discussing some new projects. These new projects are all going to be tied together, and we’ll be writing about what that tie might look [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_8365-150x150.jpg "Early Research: Letters from Styrofoam (letter library)")
![Michelle Wybenga is asking people for love letters to Windsor. As part of her ongoing micro-residency, she’s requesting from a number of people that she knows in the city for a contribution to an eventual publication of sorts containing these letters among many others. She spent the weekend at BCL HQ working towards the beginnings [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Juniper-Books-150x150.jpg "Michelle Wybenga’s Micro-Residency: Love Letters to the City")
![Our project for the 2011 Windsor Biennial, Alive & Well, was created with the hope that it would be captured on Google Maps to make a monument or announcement of sorts to the rest of the world about Windsor as we near the end of the year and ahead of being torn up for the new Aquatic [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/aliveandWellscreenshot-2-150x150.jpg "“Alive & Well” viewable on Google Maps")
![Mondays always seem to be the best studio days. Maybe it’s because the weight of the week hasn’t set in, or that the last Thursday is just far enough away that we’re motivated to try to get more work done. Whatever it is, yesterday was a particularly good example of getting things done at CIVIC [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/wpid20679-IMG_3069-150x150.jpg "Monday in the Studio: Rubber, Plaques, T-shirts")
![We were a few people short of a full crew (Michelle was sick, Danielle was away, Rosina was on the line, and it was Cristina’s birthday), but Josh, Kevin, Hiba, Karlyn and I still made the most of our Friday night studio collaboration spectacular by putting some focus on our large-scale letters project for CAFKA. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/IMG_9079-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: March 18, 2011 (the math)")
![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")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/KWAG-invite-Urban-Imaginary-150x150.jpg "Panel Discussion: What is our Urban Imaginary?")
![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")
![It’s been an incredible few weeks prepping for the launch of CIVIC SPACE and the Letter Library. Huge props to everyone who helped out, especially Kiki Athanassiadis & Lucy Howe! There’s a few hundred letters strewn about the space, waiting for you to takeout and caption the city. Stop by over the next few weeks — [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wpid18599-IMG_0310-150x150.jpg "Recap of the Letter Library Opening Event!")
![Although it’s been a while since I last worked on this project, things are continuing to move along. I finally assembled the Ladyada XBee adapters and successfully passed a message between the two XBees. So, I’m not the best solderer and the first adapter I worked on suffered from an overusing tip on my soldering [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_9485-150x150.jpg "XBees + Arduino")
![So, we’ve been busy working on the final parts of some of the Save the City projects, in particular, pulling together the postcards for this month’s Things Worth Saving (April 27th, remember?!) We wound up with around 65 photographs submitted by some fellow Windsorites of the things that they think are worth saving in the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/IMG_9124-150x150.jpg "Playing Catch Up on Save the City")
![Here it is, or at least, here’s part of the physical archive, the scannable stuff anyways, from 2008-2009. It’s been hanging out in my filing cabinet for a long time, but finally with the help of Miranda Fay during her off-hours, it’s been gradually scanned in page by page. Archives are crucial for taking stock, for remembering, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2546-150x150.jpg "Keeping Track of the Archives")
![Last Wednesday, Justin, Michelle, Josh and I flew from Detroit, MI to Atlanta, GA and drove another two hours to Chattanooga, TN for the City Share conference put on by our friends from Create Here! Veronique picked us up from the the airport in Atlanta. We grabbed a bit of food and then headed straight [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_3050-150x150.jpg "Our Arrival to Chattanooga, TN and Day One of the City Share Conference!")
![Last night Eric Boucher came to visit myself and my grandma Margaret Mongeau to interview her for Eric’s Micro-Residency with BCL. Each fellow of BCL will be introducing Eric to a person whom he has never met. Eric then will be interviewing each person exclusively on the topic of Windsor. Eric`s interview with my grandma [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/DSC01223-150x150.jpg "Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 1/5")