Flint Public Art Project – Call for Proposals
Flint Public Art Project – Flint, Michigan Call for Proposals for Temporary Installations at Spring Grove Silos - Deadline: Wednesday, June 26th Our friends over at Flint Public Art Project, an initiative which helps to organize engaging public events, workshops and temporary installations in the city of Flint, Michigan, are preparing to fund new site-based installations at the end of this [...]
Signal To Noise (think old school rotary text board randomly looking for dictionary words)
I saw this in the Globe and Mail this morning and thought it was worth reposting here given how deep we’re into thinking about text in public spaces at the moment … seems like it would be a really fun installation to see in person! The project is called S/N (Signal to Noise) and can [...]
Tom Sachs: Space Program Mars
Open publication – Free publishing – More mars This one goes to out Rosina and Sara … a look at an incredible zine for an incredibly fun project sponsored by Creative Time, SPACE PROGRAM: MARS. Think DIY aesthetics, playful criticality, and really engaging performative works. From the project description: Artist Tom Sachs takes his SPACE PROGRAM to [...]
REPOhistory: Lower Manhattan Sign Project
Stock Market Crashes by Jim Costanzo as part of REPOhistory’s Lower Manhattan Sign Project I’m making my way through Gregory Sholette‘s epic Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Writing as a participating artist and now dark matter art archivist / dare I say historian of sorts, Sholette writes on an incredible [...]
Lessons on Microfunding and Community Development from Robocop
The pitch was great, obviously; the rapped overview of the entire movie, an actual response from the mayor noting the city had no plans to create a Robocop statue, and eventually, an endorsement from the folks behind the Robocop movie. They reached their $50,000 goal, so the statue is being built. And that’s incredible. But, [...]
The Lot in Detroit: A Traveling Public Art Exhibition & Model for Temporary Use Spaces
Back in 2009, Kathy Leisen, an artist living in Corktown, Detroit, started using a vacant lot next to her house as a public art venue. She called it The Lot. And there are big letters to demarcate the space. The Lot is now less a particular vacant lot than an idea for using many vacant [...]
Let’s Colour Project
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPpMWaSPt-s It’s called the Let’s Colour Project. Ok, it’s an advertisement for a paint company, and it strikes me as being a pretty bad idea (in a long-term perspective, I kind of cringe when I see brick buildings painted here in Windsor). Inevitably, a bit history is being completely lost by painting over these walls. However, [...]
Reverse Graffiti in South Africa
We’ve tossed around the idea of engaging in some form of reverse graffiti in Windsor for quite a while now. I assume there must be a few Windsor buildings dirty enough for a nice contrast-heavy design. Any suggestions? I think the Hiram Walker storage facilities near Russel Woods are covered with a black residue, but [...]
Field Report from St.Catharines
Danielle and I have been in St.Catharines at Brock University working with an Ecopsychology class on a public art project (details to follow in coming week(s). We’re only here for a few days to help get the class started, but it’s been incredibly fun working with a bunch of strangers. We’ve explored the campus and [...]
![Wednesday was a big day in the SRSI spaces. Lea Bucknell held her Garden Party in 424 unveiling the portraits and stories that she made of Windsor residents, ProClick Factory arrives from Toronto, Thom Provost and Josh Babcock work on some hand-drawn diagrams. Robin Fitzsimons has been training hard every day in the window spaces [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_0906-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 20: Garden Party!!!")
![Continuing with the magnetic planters research, the wild flower seeds have begun to sprout and the development of the planter itself continues. Its strength has held up pretty well, but there are some issues with the wheat paste. So still some work to do, but there’s lots of documentation of the progress so far. This [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_2207-150x150.jpg "First Planter Almost Ready for Field Test")
![This is the third calendar iteration for SRSI. We’re getting close to having things finalized, which means we’ll be announcing the whole list of artists, activities, and events very soon. Michelle put this particular calendar together after the whole crew assembled a working calendar last week. We’re also anticipating on making a long, timeline(d) calendar [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/SRSI-schedule-150x150.jpg "Making Sense of Big Group Calendars")
![Below is the transcription of the interview Rosina and I had this fall with Ariane from the Centre Français in Hamilton. While going through what was discussed around the topics of francophonie in Hamilton, I came across a good amount of ideas and phrases that could be interestingly interpreted when paired in context to the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/IMG_5336-150x150.jpg "Two Tales of a City: Interview with Ariane from le Centre Français")
![The 10mm LEDs I ordered from Evil Mad Science came in and I went out today to get a CR2032 3V battery to start testing. I got 100 super white and 100 blue LEDs. This is the CR2032 battery, I got 6 of them for $2 from the Dollar Store. It would be interesting to [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/img_0997-150x150.jpg "LEDs in Action")
![We recently decided to demarcate some of many accidental meadows across Windsor with these Naturalized Area signs. In hopes that these signs might momentarily allow residents of Windsor to look at these naturalized spaces for what they are—that is, wonderful additions to our urban landscape—instead of the result of a politically-charged issue, we spent the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/IMG_3023-150x150.jpg "Making the Signs for Naturalized Areas")
![I’ll write a full post when it isn’t nearly three in the morning, but I just wanted to toss out this thing that I started working on tonight. A couple of us are trying to come up with any number of actions that might serve the dual purpose of helping to stave off (or at [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/postoffice-colouring-150x150.png "Community coloring")
![We want to invite you to participate in our new residency program, 1W3KND aimed at developing essays, interviews, manifestos, critiques, reviews, and other texts around ideas of collaboration, socially engaged works, artist-run culture, and public practices. We’re hoping to publish these in one form or another some time next year. There have been a number [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2759-640-150x150.jpg "1W3KND: Call for Submissions for a New Writing Residency")
![We played catch up on How to Forget the Border Completely on Friday night. We invented new consultancies, planned interviews and events, and came up with new tactics for forgetting a border completely. It was much needed and so much fun!!! While Danielle hides behind her hand… She was also busy inventing these crazy contraptions [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BORDERCONSULTANCY-150x150.jpg "BCL Report: April 1, 2011 (Forgetting the Border)")
![I picked up five test panels on Friday from the printers and got a test shot of them installed on the buses. These first five panels were made up internally at BCL (we still haven’t had the chance to start going through all the submissions yet). I’ll be going back to the downtown terminal this [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/img_3773-150x150.jpg "Text In-Transit Test Panel")
![As part of our Extended Field Trip #001, we’re in Peterborough staying at the artist-run-centre, Artspace. We’re hoping to conduct some intercity research where we’ll attempt to understand the similarities and differences between Peterborough and Windsor and hopefully find some intersection thereof to which we can respond. We arrived in Peterborough in the late afternoon [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_2617-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip Day 1: Stable City")
![Monday night we met with some new friends from Detroit and had an amazingly good conversation about some of the very specific differences between our two cities. Maybe unsurprisingly, much of what we perceive about each other’s cities isn’t entirely correct, and it is exactly those strange assumptions about these two border cities that continue [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IMG_5195-150x150.jpg "The International Hyper-local Exchange")
![Here it is, or at least, here’s part of the physical archive, the scannable stuff anyways, from 2008-2009. It’s been hanging out in my filing cabinet for a long time, but finally with the help of Miranda Fay during her off-hours, it’s been gradually scanned in page by page. Archives are crucial for taking stock, for remembering, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2546-150x150.jpg "Keeping Track of the Archives")
![Monday night marked the last Broken City Lab meeting of the year!!! We’ll be taking a brief break over the holidays and then gearing up for a series of events starting at the end of January. For anyone who has been wondering how to get involved or if we’d ever hold open office hours again, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_72891-150x150.jpg "Last Meeting for 2009!")
![I’ll be heading up to London, Ontario on Thursday, April 14 to speak on a panel with some incredible people as part of the Canadian Museum Association’s Annual Conference, appropriately titled, Evolve or Die!. I’m pumped to get to reconnect with Andrew Hunter and Andrew Lochhead, and to finally meet Yael Filipovic. Not familiar with these [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-13-at-9.24-150x150.jpg "Evolve or Die: CMA Conference")
![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")