Hello. We're artists working through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city.

Though we’re still very much in the middle of thinking about, beginning to write about, and generally talk about all of the amazing things that we learned as part of Save the City, these billboards are the last part of the project to be launched.

These two statements are among the many, many, many that we came up with after thinking through the experiences that we had and the people that we got to meet with Save the City, and maybe in particular, our final event, How to Save a City.

I think we wanted to suggest the end of one part of a conversation and the beginning of another. In terms of our own research, I think we’re ready to start looking at problems in different ways, as a kind of continuum of ideas, rather than points from which to react.

So, you can see these billboards in Windsor. The first, “…and then the city knew it wasn’t alone.” is at University and Church, visible when traveling west.

And the second, “…and then the city started to feel better.” is at Wyandotte and Parent, visible when traveling west.

More ahead, and in the meantime, SRSI.

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

Michelle and I spent hours and hours together yesterday. With everyone’s schedules fairly ridiculous at the moment, we’re trying to steal what little time we can to keep working. Lately, the time that we’ve all spent together has been framed exclusively almost exclusively by planning for Save the City or organizing the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, and so we’re usually burned out after a couple hours of that. Last night though, we pushed past the moment of getting burned out, and I think we got somewhere because of it.

We started our Friday night with a Skype call to Chris from the Department of Unusual Certainties regarding their project as part of the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation (they are very enthusiastic, and their projects is going to be really, really great), had some dinner, tried to imagine what will come after SRSI, and then moved on to sorting out the billboards for the last part of Save the City.

We had a lot of bad ideas. Had we stopped earlier on, today and tomorrow would have been filled with some scrambling efforts to find the finish the design, emailing it out to everyone, trying to integrate everyone’s suggestions (and likely failing to do it well), sending it out again, getting more input, etc., etc., etc. Not entirely effective, nor can that process really capture the really great sparking moments of working together in the same room (the reason, I love collaborative work).

We really want these billboards to not just cap off Save the City, not just describe or some how summarize what we’ve learned, but continue with this conversation that we’ve been having. So, we had some terrible ideas for a long while, but we moved through them, we wrote them all down, then crossed them all out eventually, and it was the process of doing that, of really talking about where we were trying to go without knowing where we were going that was entirely worth it. I think we started the billboard brainstorming around 7:30pm were ready to give up around 9pm and we were there until 11pm still finalizing things. And, they’re still not finalized yet, but they’re close.

And we didn’t just brainstorm, we did the preliminary layout(s) together, we critiqued as we went, and it was so completely worth the exhaustion. Danielle called, thankfully, so we could check our work with someone outside of that room to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious, and then we were done, and we’re very, very excited to see these go up.

I hope the summer allows more opportunities for this — a lot of time spent together doing things, working through problems together, in the same room, until we get somewhere better than where we started.

The artwork goes out Monday, and I think the billboards launch mid-month.

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

Though we have a lot more to say about Save the City than I’ll attempt right now, you should know that we put together a toolkit that describes the processes we figured out throughout the last five months. We put together a nice one-page fold up list of instructions, so to speak, for how one might take on similar tactics in (re)discovering their city, neighbourhood, block, or apartment building.

Cristina wrote about the process a while back, and the toolkits turned out really, really, really well. Soon, we’ll be posting a downloadable PDF.

The event last Friday was awesome. We had a really good turn out, we got to talk about and see (really for the first time) everything we’ve been doing so far this year all lined up together. Have we come to any conclusions? I’m not sure, but I know that we’ve begun to articulate some of the questions we’ve had for a long time, a little bit better.

We’re hoping to put together a book by the end of the summer about all of this (and by all of this, I mean Save the City). We need to devote some time to really digging into discussing what the project has been and how it unfolded. In the meantime, we still have some billboard space to fill, expect to see some photos of those in the coming weeks. As well, we still need to put together a map for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. So, lots to do, and all while we prepare for the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation!!!

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

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 city. We’re planning to write a lot of short letters on the back of these postcards and then sending them out to cities across the country (p.s. you’re invited to help!!!)

Danielle and I have also been out finishing up documenting and officially recognizing the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope across the city.

You should expect a massive post on this soon… visiting 50 sites across the city takes a lot longer than we anticipated! We’re also trying to figure out where to host our final event of the Save the City project in May — any suggestions?

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

Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above).

A part of this project involves us going around to each and every site on these lists and officially recognizing it as either a site of apology or a site of hope. Since we have 50 sites on our lists, we were beginning to run out of daylight on Sunday afternoon. That means that we only managed to visit about half of those sites, so we’re trying to find a second day to continue with our adventure.

We’ll post all of the photos from the event and a photo of every site we visit as soon as we finish!

The next Save the City event happens on March 20th, 2010 — more details soon.

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

The details: Sunday, February 28, 2010 (1pm) at 362 California Ave, Windsor

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 host an open community event on Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 1pm to map and invent two distinct community tours—Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope.

Throughout the first part of the event, Broken City Lab will lead community participants in brainstorming the numerous sites deemed to be worthy of apology—these could include failed strip malls, roads without sidewalks, or former auto factories—along with the numerous sites that give community participants hope for the city—these could include an especially great bike trail, sites of architectural significance, or places that can be imagined as being easily improved.

Immediately following the creation of these lists, Broken City Lab will set out to demarcate and officially designate each Site of Apology and Site of Hope. At each site, a short ceremony will be held and community members are welcomed to come along to help recognize each and every site.

A map demarcating each of the designated Sites of Apology and Sites of Hope will be made available online to encourage the ongoing investigation of these sites by community members.

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

Meeting twice in a week is awesome. I can’t say that enough. So much time makes us way more productive and makes it a lot easier to be OK with not having everyone there all the time.

First on the list, doing some really, really quick tests of the potential of embedding LEDs in ice or snow. We know, it’ll probably kill the battery and potentially the LEDs themselves, but we have some ideas that might make that worthwhile.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read Tom Lucier’s recent blog post. He spells out nearly everything he does in this city, for free. He draws on examples of other talented people in this city who continue to try to stick it out for who knows what reasons. He makes a compelling case for having to give up some of these things he does as labours of love.

It was upsetting and it was terrifying.

That there remains any talented creative people in this city (and I suppose I’m being slightly narrow in my definition, thinking of artists, musicians, actors, writers) is kind of incredible. As much as I believe in this city, I really don’t believe we are giving enough people enough reasons to stay.

So, I have to suggest some ridiculous and likely impossible ways to get people to stay, because that’s what we do — we look at problems, invent solutions, and then sometimes we even try to act on those solutions.

We need to establish a social innovation fund. This will supply micro-grants (up to $2500) for people who want to do something creative and amazing here in Windsor.

We need to identify and make accessible studio spaces that can be shared, are safe, up to code, and very reasonably priced. This will create a place for people to work out of should we be lucky enough to entice them to stay.

We need to figure out how to convince the huge number of people who graduate and leave every year to stay just a little while longer. This will give us ample opportunity to get those talented people invested enough in this place to want to stay.

We need to figure out how to convince more people to pay more money to retain the talent we have in this city, or we probably need to figure out how to find value in what we already do. This will provide a base level of income to keep people like Tom writing and reporting instead of having to do something like take up a paper route.

We need to put Windsor on the map, the world map, as a place in which to do more than just pass through. This will enable all of the above things to happen, and happen sooner rather than later.

We needed to do this yesterday. Realistically though, it’s already too late.

Though not necessarily an exhaustive list, but definitely worth your perusal and bookmarking, Shawn Moore over at Socialart.com has created a “loose history of art collectives.”

It’s a pretty quick read and helpful to contextualize what we do here at Broken City Lab, as we locate ourselves as a part of this lineage. I’m always wanting to spend more time thinking about the context in which we place ourselves … we’ve had the opportunity to do this in small bursts on a number of occasions (one of my favourites being our trek to New York back in September), but I also think this is where the talk around generating some kind of larger text (dare I say, self-published book) keeps hanging around in the back of my mind.

Ultimately for the sake of thinking through the larger discussion that we continually have around our practice and to counter the limits that this blog format seems to present, I’d love to say that we’ll write a book this year, but don’t hold us to that.

[image of the architecture collective, Ant Farm's Media Burn from Make]

Monday night at BCL HQ, going over plans for moving forward on our recently OAC funded project starting in January 2010, Broken City Lab: Save the City (details to follow), using good ol’ fashioned lists and future technologies—it was amazing, in every sense of the word.

Not sure how many more times we’ll be meeting over the break, but we’re all excited for what the new year has in store … so many projects, it will be excellent!

Read the rest of this entry »