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.

Magnetic Planters Finished!

IMG 9407 Magnetic Planters Finished!

Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden.

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Field Tests!

Broken City Lab's Magnetic Planters

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 to keep its shape—some of the planters without a wide edge on either side are more prone to open up really wide at the top, which makes it difficult for the soil to fill the planter uniformly. Without it, the soil eventually sinks and adding any more soil would risk making the planter too heavy for the magnet.

Michelle’s running these tests, checking on the plants daily and testing a few varieties of planter shapes in preparation of the installation of all of our planters sometime in the next week or so.

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Learning to Transplant

some flowers

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 the project (hopefully) in the next week or so.

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Seeds in the Planters, Waiting to Grow

img 24681 Seeds in the Planters, Waiting to Grow

We finished putting soil and seeds into the magnetic planters and set them on a sunny window ledge to start germinating. We figured the planters would stand a better chance at surviving (and staying in place longer than just overnight) if there were some wildflowers starting to grow.

We also went to the downtown space and started brainstorming, but I’ll make another post on that later.

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New Magnetic Planters Field Test

Broken City Lab Magnetic Planters

Friday afternoon turned out to be more productive than I thought it would. We finished embedding all the magnets we have, which means we have 25 planters either done or drying and ended up with 3 installed on various surfaces to see if they survive the rain this weekend.

If they turn out, I’ll order some more magnets, but in the meantime we’re still working on stencils (the BCL stencil above was just a test), and we should be able to get the rest up in the next week!

Owen over at Windsor Visuals also already made a great post on Friday’s Office Hours, and some of his photos are included in this post as well.

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A Mess, But We’re Closer

planters with magnets

Danielle and I spent Wednesday afternoon making some more planters, patching up some of the planters made last Friday, and adding magnets to other planters. Hopefully by Friday these will be dry and ready for departure from my studio.

I’m anxious to see these up (and this project finished, many other things to do!)

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Planters – Take 2

img 5245 Planters   Take 2

Justin couldn’t stay too long today since he had to leave for a Media City engagement.  So he set us up with the things we would need then left us alone.  He was showing Josh how the new design I started last week held up better and works with the magnets better too.

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New Design for the Planters

img 4303 New Design for the Planters

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 workable solution.

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Production Line: Magnetic Planters

3485463138 b04e504bb6 o Production Line: Magnetic Planters

After taking a week off, Broken City Lab Office Hours started up again with a focus on getting a number of the shells for the magnetic planters completed. It was a really productive meeting with some more welcomed new faces and a whole bunch of planters now ready for the next step. It wasn’t all fun though, we lost an invaluable BCL member—Mike’s blender.

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Magnetic Planters: Field Test #1

img 2255 cc Magnetic Planters: Field Test #1

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 magnetic, but chain link fences are, along with some other random surfaces.

We’ll continue with research on making these planters this week, but also start to think of what we can stamp / stencil / draw onto the flat surface of these.

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Recent Comments

  • Luciana: Justin, that would would be great!!! On the same subject, I always thought the Peace Project from Detroit could be an...
  • Justin Langlois: I agree with you, Luciana … it doesn’t have to be a bad thing at all, I suppose I was thinking about the...
  • Luciana: It doesn’t have to be a bad thing though :) It reminded me of Haas&Hahn and their Favela painting project from 2006...
  • Cristina Naccarato: Such an epic post, Justin! The map turned out very nicely!
  • darren: It’s was back when the star was still printing the paper down there. I miss those days. Was metal letters. I don’t...
  • MESM: excellent lab thesis keep the experiment going
  • Justin Langlois: Ah! Good call on the Windsor Star sign. I should have realized since I knew it was attached to the Star building. So...
  • Justin Langlois: Thanks for the note. I think the audio player should work now… Had the filename entered incorrectly. Enjoy!

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