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Cross-Border Communication: We’re In This Together

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.

Broken City Lab: Cross-Border Communication from Windsor to Detroit

This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.

Broken City Lab: Cross-Border Communication from Windsor to Detroit

With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.

Broken City Lab: Cross-Border Communication from Windsor to Detroit

Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.

Broken City Lab: Cross-Border Communication from Windsor to Detroit

Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.

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A Love Letter For You

Steve Powers

In Philadelphia, an artist named Steve Powers is working alongside the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create this large-scale mural project that paints huge sentiments of love letters onto the sides of 50 buildings on one street.

The project is called A Love Letter For You and totally made me think that there might just be potential in murals after all.

Take a look at the project blog and read it from first post to the most recent, it really gives some great context to the project.

[via an email from Nathan]

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SMS Guerilla Projector

Troika_sms_01

Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

This project, SMS Guerilla Projector, is about four years old, but it caught my eye while flipping through my copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book. The SMS Guerilla Projector does what you’re seeing above, basically project the screen image from a Nokia phone onto surfaces around the city. The project is somewhat reminiscent of the Image Fulgurator, which I posted on back in July of 2008.

Troika_sms_object

Most speculation on the interwebs suggest it’s basically a hacked phone and slide projector mashed together, which is kind of ingenious in its simplicity. Basically, and LCD screen can have light pass through it and so by opening up a phone and shining some concentrated light at the screen, so the speculation goes, you would be able to project the image with a lens.

Some other notable and interesting projects of theirs that you should check out: The Tool for Armchair Activists, SMS Memory Wall, and Exploded Monologues.

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Extended Field Trip Day 4: Everything is OK

IMG_3897

After four days at our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at Artspace, we installed our work and presented our research findings  in the main space at the gallery. After nearly 96 hours in the city, we came to realize that everything is ok in Peterborough.

Undoubtedly, we realized this by comparing our experiences in Windsor. Small things such as the fact that the parking meters in Peterborough accept change all the way down to nickels, or larger things such as the incredible number of people who either plan to stay in Peterborough or at least plan to come back eventually, make the city of Peterborough ok.

Though these four days have been only the very first opportunity we’ve had to spend a concentrated amount of time in another city in order to try to engage in some level of research, we felt like we learned a lot. There’s something about the entrepreneurial spirit in Peterborough, at all levels, that has seemed to encourage the right people to stay in the city, and it’s this sense at the very base of everything that we experienced that we need to begin to translate back to Windsor.

This translation, at the very least, will turn into more dialogue with more people back in Windsor. There’s so much to be done here and yet it seems like if more people can be convinced to try to stick it out here, just a little bit longer, that maybe we will be ok too, eventually.

Continue reading “Extended Field Trip Day 4: Everything is OK”

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Extended Field Trip Day 3: Construction

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Day 3 of our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at Artspace was filled with design, math, and construction. Having decided that the general sense of the city is that “everything is OK,” we moved forward on printing posters and building some text that will be on display for the opening Friday night.

We had many adventures in carpentry today and I think this is just the beginning of working on some more projects of this scale.

The day started with another walk around town to get our posters printed that also read, “Everything is OK.”

Continue reading “Extended Field Trip Day 3: Construction”

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100 Ways to Save the City Projection

Broken City Lab light projection in Windsor

As part of FAM Fest 09, we did a projection performance on the roof of Metro Cleaners accessed from Empire Lounge in downtown Windsor.

For about an hour and a half, we presented our 100 Ways to Save the City and then asked for ideas from the folks on the ground, at Phog, and on the Twitterverse.

After the jump, there’s 160-something photos from all the ideas that were projected on Saturday night.

Continue reading “100 Ways to Save the City Projection”

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Beautiful Light by David Therrien

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorbould

4 LETTER WORD MACHINE is a giant illuminated computer-controlled / live performance text display by artist, David Therrien.

Recently exhibited at part of Nuit Blanche this past Saturday attached to Toronto’s city hall, the installation displays “the phenomema of light and electricity and the role of light in our belief systems, language, biology, natural world and cosmology – light as illumination, energy, information – and as a metaphor for good and evil.”

Guess how much I’d love to be able to work with something at this scale.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0cDE2g1QQs&feature=player_embedded

Ignore the music in this video, but watch the work come together in Scottsdale back in January 09.

[via today and tomorrow]

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Saying Something with Banners

Everything Must Go!

Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen are working on a series of text banners / posters. Sometimes the banners are held between the two of them, other times they each hold smaller cards with texts that work off of one another. Sometimes they write the text on the banners, other times they invite others to compose it.

They’re fans of reading, typography, and from what I gather, lists.

Oh, the things that could be said with banners here—we should get on that.