By Justin on April 6th, 2010, 4:37 pm 1 Comments

In just a couple days, Danielle and I will be headed down to Lexington, Kentucky, where I’ll be presenting at this year’s Creative Cities Summit as part of the Using Art to Change Cities panel. The summit runs from April 7 – 9, 2010, I’ll be presenting on Friday, April 9th.

Here’s the panel description (good fit, no?):

Most cities support traditional notions of arts and culture, the symphony, opera, ballet and museums. Beyond those traditional bastions of culture there are artists and entrepreneurs that are actively using art to change their communities for the better. Public art is more than just the statue in front of the building and can be beautifully integrated into projects for startling results. Guerrilla art interventions, some legal, some illegal, can provoke dialog and action where before there was gridlock. And art can be used to change our very notions of fundamental things like healthcare and education to astounding results. This eclectic panel will attack this issue from their unique perspectives and is not the traditional arts and cultural conversation.

I’m so excited to get to be a part of this conversation and Danielle and I are both anxious to hear more about other cities and how they’re responding (or not) to the idea of becoming a creative city. Complex and holistic problem-solving seems to be at the foundation of what this conference wants to address — we’re hoping to learn a lot.

Did you make it to Detroit’s edition back in 2008?

Tagged: cities Creative Cities Summit Kentucky Lexington panel presentation research talk

By Justin on February 16th, 2010, 12:03 pm 1 Comments

We’re packing up and heading down to Chattanooga, Tennessee tomorrow to attend CreateHere‘s City Share Mini Conference.

What the conference is all about:

“City Share is a conference for seeding innovative projects.We bring great minds from across disciplines together in Chattanooga, Tennessee to teach, share, plan, and change. The result? International knowledge-sharing; a growing network of change-makers; and organizations across the world better equipped to serve cities, for one, for all.”

We’re excited to catch up with our friends from CreateHere (who visited us back in November), and also to meet a ton of new people. I’m quite sure we’re going to be very inspired — just check out some of the other participants.

As we continue to work on our projects, our research, and our practice, it’s really great to continue to get to know other people who aren’t necessarily working as an arts collective, but are attempting to do some of the same things we are — namely, re-imagining creative activity in response to a place.

Tagged: BCL Chattanooga cities conference create here presentation research travel

By Justin on October 21st, 2009, 1:09 am 3 Comments

Danielle and I will be heading to Montreal to speak at this year’s Canadian Association of Cultural Studies Biannual Conference at McGill University. We’re presenting in the Cultural Production panel under the theme of Social Practice and Public Space.

Our presentation entitled, “Social Practice: New Models for Collaborative Cultural Production,” will frame the city of Windsor and the research and practice of Broken City Lab as a model for collaborative cultural production and an experiment in tactically infiltrating the institutions of the city.

It should be a really great conference with other papers tackling, “Youth Artist Networks and Cultural Policy: Possibilities and Pitfalls” by Miranda Campbell, McGill University, or “The Art of Change? Toward Theorizing Community-based Cultural Production” by Sheryl Peters, York University … things like this are hugely good for getting a really fast overview of what other kinds of research are going on across the country—awesome!!!

(Plus, catching up with long lost friends and seeing Immony’s opening at Videographe are huge bonuses!)

Tagged: artist talk BCL conference McGill Montreal presentation research social practice

By Justin on September 24th, 2009, 11:49 pm 3 Comments

Day 2 of our trek to New York was filled with excellent adventures, some more great lectures, and lots of discussion. It was amazing to get to see some of the artists we’ve talked about before right here on the blog, and it continued to inform what we were continuing to try to define as our collective practice.

It’s already been five days since these pictures were taken, so I hope you’ll excuse my poor memory for some of what we saw.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL city Conflux lecture New York presentation research travel

By Justin on May 11th, 2009, 6:18 pm 8 Comments

Thursday, May 14 going to be an incredible day: Urban Mediations, a one-day symposium on urban media studies is taking place in Windsor. Co-organized by the University of Windsor’s own, Dr. Michael Darroch, the symposium will involve a collection of researchers, artists, designers, and activists talking about what it means to research the urban.

I’ll be speaking on Broken City Lab, and Danielle will be talking about architecture of urban refugees, among many other fine thinkers, doers, and writers.

Tagged: BCL city presentation urban Windsor

By Justin on March 4th, 2009, 8:42 pm 4 Comments

I’m heading out to Victoria, BC to present at the Cultural, Social, and Political Thought program’s conference, (inter)disciplinarities: theory & crisis, from March 7-8, 2009. I’ll be presenting Broken City Lab in Panel 3 on “The Urban,” under the title, Broken City Lab: Addressing the City in Crisis through Social Practice.

I’m exceptionally excited about this!

Tagged: BCL conference presentation urban Victoria

By Justin on February 12th, 2009, 7:25 am 4 Comments

Organized by local artist Jodi Green, the Windsor iteration of Talk20 happens on Thursday, February 19th, and will feature six-minute presentations by Mita Williams, Rod Strickland, Tom Lucier, Pina and Adriano Ciotoli, Andrew Foot, and Justin Langlois.

“Talk20 is not a lecture but a gathering, an open forum for the dissemination of ideas in art, architecture and design.  Produced in cities around the world talk20 has emerged as a live catalogue of contemporary creative production that seeks to instigate a conversation within and without the design community.”

The presentations start at 7:30pm at Artcite. See you there!

Tagged: community presentation talk Windsor