In Progress: A Set of Proposals for Living Affectively in an Open World
Today we’re working through a few poster designs for A Set of Proposals for Living Affectively in an Open World using gold vinyl on a previously hand-painted black background.
Call for Participation: Regret & Resolve
With the start of the new year, we wanted to take stock of the regrets we have about the city or our roles within it, and the resolutions we might make to change this place for the better. We want to ask two questions: What are the things that we know we should be doing, [...]
Civic Space Studio Digest for December 13: on t-shirts and white walls
A look at our little corner of Civic Space. This is where we’ve been spending the majority of our time lately. For the record, the high shelves (those really nice ones with the Letter Library letters on them) were installed by Kiki. The lower shelves were hacked together by me. They’re very shoddy, but they [...]
Fail to Meet Expectations: Vinyl on Paint Posters
We’ve been talking about picking up on some of the ideas we put together for the OPEN panel discussion from earlier in the month, and it seemed like posters were a natural fit. Given the text statements that we made to address the an idea of economies and creative practice that served as the backdrop [...]
No Rights/No Wrongs: Nuit Blanche 2012
On September 29th 2012, we were lucky enough to be invited to Toronto for Nuit Blanche! Our installation site was on the face of the Gladstone Hotel right on Queen Street West. It was an amazing night. It was the first time that we did a projection on a building so textured. This definitely allowed [...]
1-Day Project: “Find Something Worthwhile”
We had ordered these screen printing supplies in anticipation of using them for our upcoming Civic Maintenance project, but before we could embark on that large-scale production, we needed to test. We got process colours cmyk and the basics for screen printing – photo emulsion and photo emulsion remover and two screens. We haven’t screen [...]
100 Emergencies for North Bay (Projections in Downtown)
Thursday night, our last night in North Bay as part of our residency, we did a large-scale public projection as a kind of summary of our conversations, and as a bit of a starting point for where we see the exhibition going. Almost next door to the White Water Gallery is this huge blank wall — [...]
Installing the sign for CIVIC SPACE, take 1
Last night, Hiba, Sara, and Justin tackled some initial planning for the installation of the CIVIC SPACE / Letter Library sign. The Letter Library idea came out of trying to think through how we might make our own sign for the space, so it’s really great to finally see the letters going up. Hiba got on the [...]
Single-Use Camera Tests: Captioning the City
Kevin and Josh ventured out with a single-use camera to test what the temporary installations would look like, as we continue to prep for Thursday’s launch of the Letter Library here at CIVIC SPACE. Also, film is fun. The letters look great and the photos aren’t too bad either. They definitely have a colder tone [...]
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 [...]
![We’re hosting an algorithmic adventure to get to know our new neighbourhood. This adventure will be a psychogeographic walk of sorts starting at Broken City Lab Headquarters, which will take participants around the campus, student ghettos, the sculpture garden, Indian Road, and all of the little things that make this area worth exploring. Everyone who shows [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/welcometotheneighbourhood-150x150.jpg "Welcome to the Neighbourhood")
![Equipped with a vehicle, Michelle and I spent a few hours on Wednesday out and about in the city gathering materials to further the process on our upcoming project in Hamilton. Our first visit was to The House, a thought factory of sorts where Jodi has been fruitfully working on our collection of sewn squares [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Screen-Shot-2012-01-28-at-11.58.23-AM-150x150.png "Errands! The Next Steps for Two Tales of a City")
![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")
![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")
![This afternoon at CIVIC SPACE started out with a video chat with Jason Sturgill from Portland about a really awesome project we’ll be collaborating with him on in the spring of next year. There is also talk of Homework II happening this fall…stayed tuned for more info on this. Also, our Akimbo ad was released [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_9573-150x150.jpg "Grey Paint Test, Tattoos, and Talk of Homework II")
![I’m not sure why we didn’t start doing this earlier, but here’s the first report of our weekly activities. We’ve been meeting on Fridays for almost half the summer, trying to make, plan, and do events/projects/demos/awesome. Today involved us revisiting our seed bomb recipe, beginning the stenciling for posters for our upcoming Dance Party (details [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/Broken-City-Lab-Friday-August-22-2008-Stenciling-%2B-seed-bombs-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – August 22, 2008")
![In preparation of the upcoming event, and in response to our sudden acquisition of 4 t-shirts, we spent Tuesday evening making stencils, shirts, testing Tetris 2, wheatpasting, and figuring out the logistics of a video game tournament. First thing on the list of to-do’s was to test my custom wheatpaste applicator. The results were mixed, though I [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/engage-and-disrupt-the-city-the-front-of-our-t-shirts-150x150.jpg "BCL Report – Nov 4, 2008")
![We’re a week into taking submissions for Regret & Resolve and to get a jump start on all the t-shirt making we’ll have to do at the end of the month (remember, submissions close on January 25th), we’ve begun pressing some test shirts. We also got some great coverage in the University of Windsor Daily [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/wpid21099-IMG_2053-150x150.jpg "Behind the Scenes: T-shirt pressing for Regret & Resolve")
![So … the book we created from our research project, How to Forget the Border Completely, finally showed up!!! I’m really happy with how it looks and I can’t wait to have some time to read through it all. After this week’s activities, we should plan some kind of launch for the book. Tom’s renderings [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMG_5370-150x150.jpg "Guess what showed up today?")
![SRSI participants hit the street today in the blistering heat to interact with passersby. Lee Rodney’s Border Bookmobile gets re-routed, Emily Colombo serves up some lunch and fixes a few bikes. The Department of Unusual Certainties is working hard planning their Speed Dating for Store Owners event on Thursday, July 8 7pm inside of 406 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_0663-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 26 & 27: Hot Days Outside")
![Remember Letraset? Here are some examples of what we’ve done with it in the past. Join us tonight for another edition of All Tomorrow’s Problems. We’re making a series of posters with vintage letraset. I’m not sure what else you really need to know, but for some background, ATP is a weekly design night where [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/IMG_5550-150x150.jpg "All Tomorrow’s Problems: Tonight we’re Asking New Questions, making posters with vintage Letraset, and you’re invited")
![All Tomorrow’s Problems take a short break this week. We’ll be back on Monday, April 8th at 7pm to tackle problems big and small. Come hang out with us. Here are just a couple of examples of the things we’ve done recently in exploring how to bring people together to talk through their concerns with [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ATP-break-150x150.jpg "All Tomorrow’s Problems on Holiday for Tonight, see you on April 8th")
![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")
![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")
![We’ll be taking over 406 Pelissier from June 8th-28th and setting up a consultancy to research, investigate, and imagine alternative uses for the entire parking structure located at the corner of Park and Pelissier. Invented studies, statistics, and illustrations will be exhibited and will result in a formal report / action plan for future initiatives in [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/aconsultancy1-150x150.jpg "Broken City Lab: A Consultancy")