CAKFA.11: Reflect on Here
After months and months of work, we finally installed our project for CAFKA.11. Led by Josh, Hiba, Kevin, and myself, the project took an incredible amount of research and build time, but we were incredibly excited to see our efforts finally in place in front of Kitchener’s City Hall when we wrapped up the installation [...]
BCL Report: May 5, 2011 (Big Books & Small Letters)
We met twice on Thursday, and those meetings were after Michelle and I headed over to SB Contemporary Art to finally check out “On Your Mark” (a great exhibition featuring work by many of our friends) and talk about how we could partner in some way on Homework: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices. Back [...]
BCL Report: April 21, 2011 (making decisions)
Thursday night was a night of decisions and tests. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks just trying to get caught up generally with projects and Thursday marked the beginning of the deciding how to start wrapping up How to Forget the Border Completely and what direction to move in to make some more progress on [...]
Retroreflective Materials Test
Earlier this week we received a couple of samples of various retroreflective materials for use on our letters for CAFKA. One material, the one on the roll, is a vinyl (3M Scotchlite Reflective White Vinyl), perhaps most famously used in the Bright Bike project, while the other is an industrial substrate (3M Engineer Grade White [...]
BCL Report: April 11, 2011 (oh, the logistics)
It was Monday night and Karlyn’s Birthday, so Hiba and Kevin brought a fun cake. Other things happened as well, and strangely, or maybe expectedly, now that the semester’s done and since we didn’t meet at the very end of the week, we had a marathon five hour meeting. It was so great!!!
BCL Report: March 18, 2011 (the math)
We were a few people short of a full crew (Michelle was sick, Danielle was away, Rosina was on the line, and it was Cristina’s birthday), but Josh, Kevin, Hiba, Karlyn and I still made the most of our Friday night studio collaboration spectacular by putting some focus on our large-scale letters project for CAFKA. [...]
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 [...]
Prepping for Next Week- Last Coats and Beads!
Yet another extremely productive weekend at BCL HQ! We’ve been finishing up the last preparations for our cardboard letters, which we hope to be unveiling them in our first chosen spot next week!
Red Paint & Testing Glass Beads
We made a lot of progress tonight, not only getting a considerable way through the first coat of red paint, but also testing a variety of techniques for applying the retroreflective glass beads! We also got to spend some time talking through how we’ll be temporarily installing the letters in a variety of spaces. We [...]
Retroreflective Glass Beads Have Arrived, Weeks of Work Ahead!
On Friday night we played with some new things that Rosina brought over — retroreflective glass beads to be exact. We also made it through another three letters doing papier maché! And, we selected a colour for the letters, again thanks to Rosina doing some recon on paint chips.
![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")
![The Save the City project aims to create a concentrated series of positive community-based activities facilitated by Broken City Lab in collaboration with community members. The project will address a number of issues and ideas specific to Windsor, Ontario through various collaborative community-based activities. As Windsor is situated in precarious economic, cultural, and geographic positions, the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/BCL-STC-Jan-5x7-back-website-green-150x150.jpg "Save the City: an overview")
![Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way. This message is part of a project that we started working on in [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/BCL-CBC-1-sm-520-150x150.jpg "Cross-Border Communication: We’re In This Together")
![Our project for the 2011 Windsor Biennial, Alive & Well, was created with the hope that it would be captured on Google Maps to make a monument or announcement of sorts to the rest of the world about Windsor as we near the end of the year and ahead of being torn up for the new Aquatic [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/aliveandWellscreenshot-2-150x150.jpg "“Alive & Well” viewable on Google Maps")
![Wednesday afternoon shifts into further work on testing the efficacy of the styrofoam letters being black. We’re trying to decide in anticipation of our Letter Library (A Collection of Alphabetic Interventions). Sara and Hiba painted. HELLO. Also, Kiki came by to help us paint the movable wall! And, Josh made these for a workshop [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9276-150x150.jpg "Designing & Prototyping tools for intervention: Letter Library + Gif Party")
![In order to keep things moving with Eric Boucher’s Micro-Residency project, I invited Eric to interview my oldest (in terms of age) friend Terry Marentette yesterday afternoon. I met Terry two years ago in an Art History class at the School of Visual Arts and was immediately astonished by his immense knowledge of Windsor’s past. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/042-150x150.jpg "Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 3/5")
![On Monday, Norman Eberstein patrolled the alley, The Department of Unusual Certainties decorated their office and did some brainstorming, Thea Jones and Stephen Surlin moved in. Simon’s return to Windsor brought a lot of activity to the back of 410, where Chris had been sitting at his desk for a few days prior. The workspace [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DSC_0783-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 11: Norman’s Crush and Getting Organized")
![On Day 2 of our ATTC Calgary with Truck Gallery’s CAMPER Urban Discovery project, our ongoing work finds us asking questions about a city that we’re still just getting to know. The questions are, necessarily, basic and straight forward. We’re not conducting deep sociological or statistical research, but rather trying to tease out a series of narratives that [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/IMG_3290-150x150.jpg "ATTC Calgary Day 2: Stories of a Distanced City")
![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 hope you’ll forgive us for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been on a film shoot all day, everyday for the last few weeks, while other BCL folks have been traveling, moving, working, and studying, and so meeting even once a week has been a challenge. Thankfully, school is literally a couple days away [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/IMG_4915-150x150.jpg "Field Tests & Exampling: Moving the Planters")
![Friday night was especially fun. With next week being our first research report for How to Forget the Border Completely, we basically spent the evening casually going over some preliminary research, planning out some new directions, and getting more acquainted with the collection of border books next door. Michelle brought a tourism Detroit magazine she [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/IMG_8505-150x150.jpg "Quality Time with Books & Imaginary Spaces")
![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")
![ Last night Justin, Danielle and I headed over to the Magic Stick to take part in the We Like Music Festival. We began projecting reasons why we love Detroit that we had brainstormed together here. Aside from reasons why we, as Windsorites love that Detroit is right across the river, we also included physical [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/IMG_0504-150x150.jpg "Saturday Night in Detroit")
![Our recipe from the other night produced a much stronger planter, though I think there’s still room to add a coat of wheat paste to the outside. The rare earth magnets do well if there’s two, but I think the best solution will be to adhere them to the outside of the planter, or embed [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_4208-150x150.jpg "Rare Earth Magnets + New Pulp Recipe")
![This past Saturday I did my portion of the BCL collab/micro-residency with the lovely and talented wunderkind, Mr.Eric Boucher. For the collab I had Eric interview my sister’s good friend, Sam. Aside from her notable charm, I think Sam was a good candidate for the project because she is a student who came from Sarnia [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/eric_sam_dec1209-150x150.jpg "Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 6/6")
![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")
![Monday night was another huge brainstorming session with some new and old friends. We spent most of the evening trying to figure out the potentials in doing something like a floating sculpture in the Detroit River. We’ve discussed this before, and it seems that the space between what we’d really like to do and reality [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_5441-150x150.jpg "Earlier This Week In the Basement of BCL HQ")