Grades for public infrastructure
Has this already been done somewhere? The idea of creating grade sheets for things in the city and then a space for comments or something? Might we take it on too? This photo is of a page in the book Waking Up from the Nightmare of Participation, I think it’s a template of an evaluation form [...]
Marcos Zotes’ CCTV / Creative Control
Marcos Zotes, an architect and artist living in New York, recently completed CCTV/Creative Control, an intervention consisting of the projection of “an over-sized eye onto the lower surface of the 10-storey-hight Milton Street water tower in Brooklyn, New York.” This particular tower is a very ideal fit for an oval-shaped projection and since it does [...]
Make This Better: Drouillard Road
Here is some good news: Amidst the biased newspaper articles and the rumoured reputations, Drouillard Road is actually in an okay place. A year or two ago, I was irked by a few things I had read in a familiar news source, depicting residents as downtrodden and troublesome, crimes and drug deals treated as the [...]
Building a Wooden Test-Letter
Back in 2010 we conceptualized numerous iterations of Kitchener-Waterloo border installations for Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area (CAFKA). We decided on an ambitious wooden installation which will sit in a shallow pond at the city hall nearby. Our text installation, which will read REFLECT ON HERE, will need some thorough planning. For this reason, [...]
Anger Release Machine
Here is a new alternative to internalizing your anger! This vending machine, created by Yarisal & Kublitz, is a mechanism of anger therapy. After inserting a coin, you can choose which piece of china you would like to drop to the bottom of the machine and shatter. This, in theory, will make you feel better. [...]
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).
Make This Better: Ripper’s Valley
This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts as we temporarily install these letters across the city to generate some conversation and creative thinking around how we can indeed make this (place) better. You can check out the process of making these letters in this archive of posts. Ripper’s Valley is visible [...]
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro’s “Olmsted’s Blank Snow” Project
Soon enough we’ll be getting into the thick of winter and Sergio Lopez-Pineiro–an assistant professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo–is not going to let the snowfall go to waste this year. He is planning a large scale project in Buffalo’s Front Park which involves plowing snow into 15 giant mounds, forming a pattern [...]
Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’
Ceyetano Ferrer, City of Chicago (Iowa #2), 2006 Street artist Ceyetano Ferrer specializes in blending urban objects into their environments by painting layers over them in a way that makes them seem transparent. Ferrer uses photo stickers on public objects like street signs, boxes and billboards and camouflages them to create an illusion of the objects [...]
Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art
Anyone who has an interest in the world of guerilla street art probably already knows about the recently published Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art. The book, published by Taschen of course, contains photographs of many ephemeral works that might have been easily lost forever. The street art movement is more than deserving of [...]
![After a full night’s rest and a wholesome breakfast at The Tallest Poppy, we headed back to Martha Street Studio to formulate a game plan for our second work session and workshop later that evening. Knowing that we had an inordinate amount of work to do before our opening, we decided to spend the bulk [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_5976-150x150.jpg "Martha Street Studio Residency Day 2: Another Day in Manisnowba")
![To continue the progress of our cardboard letter project, I took the remaining pieces home on the weekend to finish T, E, and R. Though the first stage may be over, there’s still plenty left to work on in terms of researching and experimenting with various materials which I looked into as well. After constructing [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_3279-150x150.jpg "Fun with Cardboard Letters")
![Last night out a window in the county, the new projector at night. Today, finishing our list of 100 ways to save the city. It’s going to run as a presentation in Keynote, the easiest failsafe solution. Though, we might try to open it up on Twitter somehow later tonight. And, speaking of tonight, the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_5327-150x150.jpg "Prepping for FAM Fest Projection")
![Lee Rodney teaches one of the best courses at the University of Windsor, Border Culture. I took the course in the fall of 2010 and wrote a book: The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor. The book serves as documentation and comparative analysis of three specific forgotten spaces in downtown Windsor, Ontario, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cuts-150x150.jpg "The Creation of Place in Abandoned Railway Cuts in Windsor: 1/4 Intro")
![A little while ago, we were trying to think through how to wrap up Save the City with a pair of billboards. We spent an evening really working through some ideas and came up with two statements that we felt articulated the end of a certain way of thinking about Windsor. Something about those statements [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2247-150x150.jpg "…and then the city, a book")
![My work on this ongoing LCD Arduino project has been continuing over the last couple of weeks, I just haven’t had the time to update appropriately. So, I switched over my plan of attack from Processing to PHP. I figured this made sense for a couple reasons: first, I’m already very well-acquainted with PHP, I’ve [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_7140-150x150.jpg "More Arduino + LCD + PHP fun")
![Yesterday was just lovely! Andrea Carvalho did a parking garage performance as part of her study of Non-Places, Kero set up his interactive installation, and a lot of familiar local friends rolled through The People’s Museum to contribute to the giant map. Andrea has been trying to perform in this space for a few days [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/IMG_0449-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 8: Rethinking Parking Garages")
![This is part of an ongoing set of one-question emails sent to people we know, or would like to get to know, about things that interest us and inform our collective practice. They’ll be featured on the site weekly, usually on Fridays. These questions are more about unfolding ideas than about the people we’re asking, but we do [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/suebellyank3-150x150.jpg "Sue Bell Yank on Art and Social Practice")
![I’ve made some really great progress on this ongoing Arduino + LCD project over the last couple of weeks — some of the two larger hurdles are now out of the way, the results of which you can see in the video above. Since the video was shot, I’ve improved the PHP script some more [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8202-150x150.jpg "Parsing RSS Feeds for the Arduino + LCD + PHP project")
![We want to know about London, Ontario. We’re doing an exhibition at Forest City Gallery, opening in September, and we’re looking into the wide range of narratives that go into constructing a place — the architecture, the headlines, the people, the memories, the relationships, the rumours — and we’re hoping you can help us out. Whether you’re [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ATTC-London-150x150.jpg "A Set of Informal Questions about London, Ontario")
![It might seem a bit quiet around here as of late, but rest assured we’re keeping busy. We’re in the thick of paperwork — grant reports, project proposals, etc. However, we’re also quickly approaching the start of a new project that you’ll see unfold here likely over the next month or two. Danielle is working [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2398-150x150.jpg "Keeping Busy")
![For one of my last projects with Sigi Torinus as part of my BFA degree I made an iphone App. I was able to speed up a usually lengthy process by skipping over the coding portion of creating the app. This was made possible by using Buzztouch, a web-based content management software (CMS) out of Montery California [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/citynoisepresents_blog-150x150.jpg "I made an iPhone App and so can you !!!")
![I took a leisurely bike ride around the neighbourhood yesterday afternoon. It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to explore, to spend time paying attention to things. I basically wanted an update on the neighbourhood that Danielle and I had lived in a couple years ago. The eastern edge of Sandwich is quieter than ever. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2416-150x150.jpg "Getting Reacquainted with the Neighbourhood")
![Though we’ve received a few of the postcards back because of a faulty address, for the most part, the 150 postcards sent out for Things Worth Saving, as part of our ongoing Save the City project, have likely now arrived to their destinations. I must admit that when I first laid eyes on the stacks [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_4651-150x150.jpg "Things Worth Saving Recap")
![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")
![Last night’s Noiseborder event was a success. A number of people came down to Studio A in Lambton tower and helped us collaboratively rewrite Windsor’s history using maps, time lines, and story boards. All content was digitally remixed and projected on the screen with old photos and videos of Windsor. Justin started off the night by explaining [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/michellegc1-150x150.jpg "Smorgasborder 02: Rewriting Windsor")
![Broken City Lab is launching a new micro-grant program and we need you to apply. As a part of our upcoming publication, How to Forget the Border Completely, The Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant gives you the opportunity to cross the Windsor-Detroit border. We’re looking for a variety of experiences gained from crossing the border, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/microgrant-v21-150x150.jpg "Windsor-Detroit Border Crossing Micro Grant")
![We spent part of Monday afternoon doing a site visit for an upcoming project we’ve been planning for a while. The EC Row Walkway crosses over the 6 lanes of EC Row and is a pretty incredible view. We took some measurements and did a quick visibility test. We were only up there for about [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_2037-150x150.jpg "EC Row Walkway Measurement")