Two Tales of a City opens in Hamilton!
As February wrapped up, we prepared our bunting and banner components to be shipped up to Hamilton for the install. Sara and I went to Canadian Tire to buy Scotch Guard to weather-seal and water-proof the work. We bought two different kinds, both sealed the fabric adequately after setting to dry for a few hours. [...]
DIY: Air Quality Balloons
I found this post not too long ago and have been wanting to make one of these ever since. What’s making these balloons glow is the pollutants in the air around them, with colours ranging from green (signifying excellent air quality) to red (poor air quality).
The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation: Launching June 11, 2010
For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place [...]
Stay Tuned…
…For the Save The City Micro Tool Kit! It will be distributed at our last event for Save The City, this Friday May 21st @ 7pm @ the Art Gallery of Windsor. A downloadable and printable version will also be available here, soon! The kit will include recipes to cook up some BCL-like civic engagement [...]
New Project Soon (Keep Your July Open)
Not that we don’t already have our hands full, but seeing as it’s nearly March, we’re starting to look ahead to summer time activities. These activities might be somewhat related to this ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the blog. We’ll be posting more information soon, but for now, just know that if you’ve been [...]
An Update to the Website: Projects Section
It’s probably a longtime coming, but we’ve finally added a PROJECTS section to the website. So, rather than having to dig through our archives, this page will offer a quick overview of some of our finished projects starting back in September 2008.
Oh, Paperwork in the New HQ
We spent the better part of the evening at our new headquarters located at the edge of campus. It’s exceptionally great to be in a place that we can use as a work space / office space that we’ll be able to leave setup. Working in Lebel for the past year was good for a [...]
Being Productive Again: Day 3
Another great day in 406 Pelissier. We got lots of brainstorming done and continued our planning and work with plastic bag recycling projects. It’s been a fantastic three days, and being able to work in such a concentrated way in just one week has been really helpful in pushing forward on some new ideas. We [...]
Being Productive Again: Day 2
Today was another great, amazingly fun and productive day in 406 Pelissier! We did a lot of material tests, figured out some more details on our book, met some new people, and generally enjoyed having a dedicated workspace. It’s going to be very hard to give up this space.
![Another iteration of our Text On Ice series, this time spelling out, “Let’s Be Friends” and mounted on a fence bordering the Forster Secondary School‘s field. Danielle and I made quick work, though as usual, our fingers froze long before we finished. It would have been easier to have someone else on the other side [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_1683-2-150x150.jpg "Let’s Be Friends")
![This morning, on one of Transit Windsor’s new hybrid buses, we saw one of the nearly 100 Text In-Transit panels (this is the first panel on this new bus, as far as we could tell anyways). I believe they will all be installed on Transit Windsor’s entire fleet in the coming days. Let us know [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/IMG_2737-150x150.jpg "Transit Windsor Panels on the Buses!")
![A few hours before we were set to do the 100 Ways to Save the City project, we decided we wanted to make it interactive in some way. I had gone ahead and put all of our ideas on how we might suggest saving the city into a nice Keynote presentation that we could easily [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/maxlivetext-screenshot-150x150.jpg "Interface for our Text Projection Tool")
![Meeting outside is the greatest. There’s talk of building some kind of mobile table / bistro to make this possible in other locations, but I suppose that’s further down on the to-do list. For now, we’re immersed in bringing together research and inventions around our How to Forget the Border Completely project to pull into [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_9987-150x150.jpg "Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell")
![It’s been a busy last week, getting back from Victoria, and launching the Text In-Transit Call For Submissions, but we still had time to meet for our weekly Office Hours and continue working with the Massey Physics Club. Our adventures in paper making for an upcoming planters project we have in mind, and in learning [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_3378-150x150.jpg "Physics Club + Making Paper")
![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")
![We had an incredible turnout for Sing to the Streets. The response was overwhelming, and despite the cold, we managed to get a great overview of some of the folkloric history of Windsor and Detroit and learn some Francophone folks songs along the way. The Save the City project is really giving us a lot of insight into [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8029-150x150.jpg "We Sang to the Streets!")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6483-150x150.jpg "Snow, LEDs, Flights, Fill-in-the-blanks, Proofs, and Postcards")
![The details: Friday, May 21 at 7pm, Art Gallery of Windsor. For the past five months, we’ve been working on a series of events aimed at unfolding the stories, experiences, images, geography, buildings, folkloric histories, people, and places that make Windsor the city that it is. Perhaps you’ve come out to one of our community events [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/BCL-STC-MAY-5x7-french-outlines-520-150x150.jpg "How to Save a City")
![I’m starting a new project in creating a series of iPhone applications for Surviving Windsor. Some of these applications will be absurd, some useful, but all will be focused primarily on the specific conditions and realities found here in South Detroit. This suite of applications takes the city as its conceptual backing, generating a set of small [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3934-150x150.jpg "iPhone app development (on paper)")
![It was just Rosina and I on Wednesday night, but we didn’t let that stop us from starting some new work! I remember when I first posted / talked about the Imaginary Platform, Rosina had seemed keen on figuring out a way to distribute it. So, that’s how we spent the evening, working through ideas [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_3495-150x150.jpg "Oversized Envelopes: Working on Distributing an Imaginary Platform")
![Armed with an algorithm from Sara, Michelle, Rosina, and I headed out on a walk on Monday night. We had decided at our last meeting to roam around some South Windsor neighbourhoods — seeing as we rarely get a chance to venture into that part of town — and we were surprised by how much [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IMG_6686-150x150.jpg "Monday Night Drift: Volume 1, South Windsor")
![Just unboxed our laser cut acrylic from Ponoko for a new project we’ll be working on over the summer. We started some really early brainstorming on this over six months ago, so it feels really great to finally be moving it forward. Above, the back of the piece of acrylic. The front, with the protecting [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wpid18724-IMG_0058-150x150.jpg "Some Laser Cut Acrylic for New Project (unboxing)")
![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")
![Just back from an incredible week installing at Eye Level Gallery for our show, Unrest Everywhere (tools for playing with Halifax), which runs until May 12, 2012. The show features a number of multiples and interactive works, all of which are yours for the taking and borrowing. The premise for the show was to create [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_7792-150x150.jpg "New Exhibition: Unrest Everywhere (Tools for Playing with Halifax)")
![Starting on January 15, 2013, we’ll be offering a new workshop series for anyone and everyone interested in learning about electronics and physical computing. Hosted by Paul Anderson – a man of too many hobbies who holds the advanced qualification for ham radio in Canada, and has been working with electronics on and off since childhood [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BEDO-POSTER-150x150.jpg "New Workshop Series Starting in January: Building Electronics / Designing Originally")
