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.

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 in need of new imagination.

We’ve been planning this for months, and we’re incredibly excited to see it finally launch this Friday, June 11, 2010.

Michelle will be posting constantly for the next month, and we’ll be noting the open and close times for each day soon. In the meantime,  feel free to download the entire schedule in PDF.

The Schedule: All projects take place in either 406, 410 or 424 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor.

This project is generously supported by the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, Arts Council Windsor & Region, Windsor Pride, and the Ontario Arts Council.

…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 in your city!

Remember:

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 planning on visiting Windsor, you should try to keep your calendars open in July.

And, hope to see you SUNDAY, February 28th – 1pm at 362 California!

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.

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 number of reasons, but was also difficult as we shared the space with the Green Corridor class, so we always had to pack up everything at the end of the night. Now, we’ll be able to spread out and have a better space to work together.

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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 came up with a good plan for some “must do” things over the next few months, more details soon!

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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.

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Now that Intersession is done, we’ve finally been able to put that downtown space to some use. Cristina and I spent the better part of the day in the space, using it basically as an office, but we’ll be there at least one more day this week and potentially one day on the weekend picking up where we left off on some older projects and inevitably starting some new ones.

On today’s agenda: see the new hybrid buses and look for some Text In-Transit signs (which we found), set up a small work area in the space, make some preliminary decisions about our book so we can get started on it, and photograph a new research site.

Also, we’re looking for any biodegradable plastic bags you may have (hint: Bulk Barn gives out biodegradable bags) for another project. If you have any, please drop them off at 406 Pelissier. We’ll be there Tuesday from 12noon until around 4pm.

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Justin has some process shots, and those will probably be posted at some point, but I figured I’d go ahead and share the product of five or so hours of ironing inside-out plastic grocery bags. So far, I’ve made some envelopes, a box, and some random swatches to see if leftover scaps can be fused into a solid sheet (they can). Eight layers (four bags or one bag folded on itself twice) yields a stupidly strong, Tyvek-like material that can be fused to itself (that is, you can fuse seams to make envelopes or pouches or fuse multiple, smaller sheets together to make a piece of material any size). Uhm. And you can also weave strips together and fuse that (top left), but that doesn’t really have much in the way of practical applications.

And there’s these guys:

Each pouch is made from a single bag, and the one on the left is actually compostable (if any of you are Bulk Barn shoppers, you should hang onto those). I do ever so wonder what we’ll do with biodegradable plastic (read: mold-proof) pouches with rare earth magnets embedded in the back…

It’s a product made by MIO from recycled paper, and is available at Target, but I mainly wanted to post this as a note. As we’ve now “mastered” the process of making paper, we should consider different shapes for the planters we’re working on, which will likely help to guide the process of making the planter frames from the wire we have.

[via Inhabitat]