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Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach

Lisa Anne Auerbach came to Windsor and did an artist talk, almost a couple years ago now. I remember in particular, her slide that stood in for her graduate work—it was just a blank slide, I chuckled and kind of shivered. Beyond that, I can’t remember a lot of her presentation, other than she also worked at a planetarium at some point, and published zines, but something about her practice stuck with me.

Her work that seems to make the rounds most often is pictured above—sweaters with (mostly) political messaging on them. Using a computer-controlled knitting machine, she often makes sweaters and matching skirts and then poses in them. The messages are somewhat immediate responses to current cultural and political climates, and it might be the immediacy of the response that I enjoy so much; well, the immediacy and the text.

Also, I thought it might be a good reference for the fun folks over at CNAP.

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You Are Worth It: Biodegradable Balloons

YOU ARE WORTH IT.

As part of Green Corridor’s Open Corridor festival, I’ll be working with 500 biodegradable balloons with “YOU ARE WORTH IT.” printed on them. The balloons will be filled with helium and some wildflower seeds, 200 of them will be launched anchored throughout the Green Corridor area and handed out to those in attendance next Thursday, June 18th.

Over the next few months, the remaining 300 balloons will be used for a variety of smaller launches and handed out in small bunches.

The balloons will act as a kind of seed bomb, meant to distribute wildflowers to some of the many ideal locations across the city for new gardens.

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The Hallway

The Hallway, an installation by Miranda July is a 125 foot hallway with a series of what looks to be hand-painted text panels with English in one direction and Japanese in the other.

It made me think a real-life version of Passage, the lo-fi game by Jason Rohrer.

Promise you’ll watch the whole thing.

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Map Text

California Map Project

Pardon me for being a little behind the times, but John Baldessari‘s “California Map Project” from 1969 strikes a chord of creativity in me. Maybe we could find a way to blend the scale of this project with the plausibility of our Google Earth rooftop idea. Basically, John Baldessari took a map of California (bottom right) and went to the places where the map letters “California” would be located, and spelled out the letters in rocks or other ways.

From the artist – “Photographs of letters that spell California and of the map used for locating the site of each letter. The letters vary in scale from one foot to approximatly one hundred feet, and in materials used. The letters are located as near as possible within the area occupied by the letters on the map. The idea was to see the landscape as a map and to actually execute each letter and symbol of the map employed on the corresponding part of the earth. It was an attempt to make the real world match a map, to impose a language on nature and vice-versa.”

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First 5 Text In-Transit Panels Installed

Everything is Possible - on the tunnel bus

Last night Danielle and I went to the downtown Transit Windsor terminal to install the first five test panels we had printed for Text In-Transit. The panels read: everything is possible, YOU MADE MY DAY, YOU ARE THE CITY, YOU CHANGED EVERYTHING, and changing the world starts by changing this city. We had to install these panels while the buses momentarily stopped at the terminal, so it was pretty quick. When we install the rest of the panels later this month, we’ll do it at the garage.

Continue reading “First 5 Text In-Transit Panels Installed”

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Interventions in Madrid

SpY

There is a lot of great work by SpY, so I’m not entirely sure why I chose to post on this work, other than maybe it was the most dissimilar from ideas that we’ve had in the past. Fabricating these letters picture above that can stand as an urban fence or bike rack, SpY typically works by inserting humourous (though always necessarily political) objects, infrastructures, texts, and images into the cityscape.

Starting as a graffiti artist in the mid-eighties, SpY has since moved into interventionist territories, all of which is entirely worth a look at over at his website.

[via rebel:art]

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Text In-Transit Test Panel

You Made My Day

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 evening to actually install the five test panels on a couple of buses, so keep an eye out for them over the next week.

I’ll post some more photos of the panels installed tomorrow.

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BCL’s 1 Year Anniversary

a cake, courtesy of the Evernote blog

Today is the 1 year anniversary of the conversation I had with Danielle that sparked the idea for Broken City Lab. We had just finished eating dinner, I was doing the dishes, and we were talking about what protest means today, and  how to move beyond protest towards social change. Right after the conversation, I wrote a one-page description of what a concentrated effort to change things in the city incrementally through artistic practice might look like and titled it Broken City Lab.

It wasn’t until later on in the summer last year that a few of us got together as Broken City Lab, and we started to carve out, rewrite, rethink, and actually do the things that has made BCL what it is now. I just wanted to make a little note, even just for myself, about what was happening a year ago and what we’ve done since then. 

So, as an anniversary gift to you, here are some interesting things I’ve read and seen recently:

Detroit House: $100. Bold New Ideas for the City: Priceless.

GREENING THE REVOLUTION

Christian Robert-Tissot’s Nature Morte  (via vvork)

In Hard Times, Public Places are More Important Than Ever

Happy March 19th!

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New Text In-Transit Submission Form!

Text In-Transit Submission Form by Steven Cochrane

Courtesy of the always brilliant Steven …

There’s now a new submission form that allows you to get a quick preview of what your Text In-Transit panel could look like, along with a fun little colour swatch. If you’ve already submitted, it’s worth submitting more just to try this out, and if you haven’t submitted yet—get on it!!!

Check out the NEW Text In-Transit Call for Submissions page!

Or if you’re more comfortable with an old fashioned email, that’s still fine too.