Day 2 & 3 at Eastern Edge
The last few days have been so busy here, at Eastern Edge. In anticipation of the 24 hour Art Marathon that is happening today, we have been keeping busy getting the Public Space Gallery installed and running. Here’s a recap. On Thursday, we held our “Assembling the Public Space Gallery Workshop”. Before the workshop, Josh [...]
Power House Walking Tour: Understanding the Incremental
On Saturday, Eric, Danielle, and her sister, Jessica, and I headed over to the Power House neighbourhood walk in Detroit. I’d been hoping to finally see this project in person, as it’s been a little over two years since I first wrote about it here. I’d missed their residency at the DIA (saw the installation, [...]
How Walking Around Your City Can Lead to Something Great
By some estimates (including the CBC), there were 100 people on the walk we took on Tuesday night, in the rain, throughout downtown Windsor. The attendance alone was inspiring, but what really made the experience so incredible for me was the energy that everyone brought. When we stopped and took a moment to briefly talk [...]
SRSI, Day 14: Field Research, Sweater Vests and Postcards
Leesa Bringas’ Postcards to Indian Road project is coming along nicely; some postcards with messages have been returned to her in the mail. Jodi is wrapping up her Sweater Factory with a few completed sweater vests and more to come. BCL Research Fellows Josh and Rosina have been helping the Department of Unusual Certainties with [...]
![Now that Intersession is done, we’ve finally been able to put that downtown space to some use. Cristina and I spent the better part of the day in the space, using it basically as an office, but we’ll be there at least one more day this week and potentially one day on the weekend picking [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/IMG_0583-150x150.jpg "Being Productive Again: Day 1")
![Some of our single use cameras have been developed and placed on our Letter Library grid wall. Above are some of our favourites so far! There has been such a diverse array of captions coming in, and we’re so excited to develop the rest of the cameras to see what other captions were created, but [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/lettergrid-150x150.jpg "Check it: Captioning the City with the Letter Library")
![We had another great Friday night meeting, even though Josh was sick, and even though we underestimated two things. First, we struggled again thinking through this second residency/conference idea, and the letters took way longer than anticipated to papier mâché. At any rate, with the autumn weather firmly setting in, it’s looking like we’ll be [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/IMG_3581-150x150.jpg "Getting Closer Every Week: Big Letters and New Titles")
![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 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_9505-150x150.jpg "Retroreflective Materials Test")
![The Eco-House was bumpin’ Friday night! Amongst a slew of other undergoing projects, Michelle, Rosina, Josh and I we’re all hard at work, trying to get everything organized for our upcoming event and final installment of Save The City that’s taking place this Friday at the Art Gallery of Windsor! Rosina and I tackled the Save The City [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_4835web-150x150.jpg "Getting things done!")
![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")
![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 — [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/wpid19048-MG_1594-150x150.jpg "100 Emergencies for North Bay (Projections in Downtown)")
![Sunday night was the first event of our Save the City project: Listen to the City, and it was incredible!!! We had an amazingly generous crowd of old friends and new faces come out to share their stories of Windsor with us and we recorded close to 8 hours of their hopes, concerns, and personal [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_9288-150x150.jpg "Listen to the City: Discovering the Histories of Windsor through Conversation")
![We spent last night sketching out all of the repairs we could think of for the coming year (a Broken City Lab strategic plan of sorts). It took a couple of hours, 15 markers, and about 30 square feet of paper (see the whole image), but we came up with some very exciting ideas. Among [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/strategicplan2009-web-150x150.jpg "2009 Strategic Plan")
![We had an incredible turnout for Sing to the Streets. The response was overwhelming, and despite the cold, we managed to get a great overview of some of the folkloric history of Windsor and Detroit and learn some Francophone folks songs along the way. The Save the City project is really giving us a lot of insight into [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8029-150x150.jpg "We Sang to the Streets!")
![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! On friday night, we cracked open the paint once more to paint the final coats on before we begin to add the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/IMG_0578-150x150.jpg "Prepping for Next Week- Last Coats and Beads!")
![After our post a few weeks ago about a new interactive window installation, we had some interesting and helpful suggestions, but one email in particular stood out. Paul Anderson wrote to us briefly with an offer to help and after a quick introduction of his incredible depth of knowledge of all things electronic shortly thereafter, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wpid20203-IMG_1503-150x150.jpg "Interactive Window Installation, progressing beyond the Max/MSP solution")
![Danielle and I will head to Portland State University this weekend to participate in Open Engagement, the conference that asks questions like, “Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?” We’ll be [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/openengagement-150x150.jpg "Open Engagement, Group Work: The Collective Impetus")
![Broken City Lab Office Hours on Tuesday were hugely productive. We completely finished getting all the resistors on the LED sign, measured out all the letters with flagging tape for the EC Row Project, organized some logistics for the planning stages of a couple other upcoming projects, and figured out the title for our upcoming [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2009-02-04-026-150x150.jpg "Moving Along with Flagging Tape and LEDs")
![FRIDAY, SEPT.14th, 2012 @ WAHC 7:30PM -10PM OPENING RECEPTION: BROKEN CITY LAB AS OF 2012 WE ARE ALIVE & WELL: FOUR YEARS IN WINDSOR & BEYOND WAHC’s year- long exploration of growing up in working class cities or families concludes with the first ever career survey of art and urban research collective Broken City Lab. [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/BCLflyer-150x150.jpg "New Exhibition: AS OF 2012 WE ARE ALIVE & WELL: FOUR YEARS IN WINDSOR & BEYOND")
![HOMEWORK: Infrastructures & Collaboration in Social Practices is four-day residency, two-day conference, and collaboratively-written publication aimed at generating conversation around the following: alternative infrastructures, radical collaboration, social practice, art implicated in social change, neighbourhood-level activities, city-wide imaginations, site-specific curiosities, tactical resistance, new models for art education and research. Facilitated by Broken City Lab, HOMEWORK calls on artists, scholars, writers, thinkers, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/register1-150x150.jpg "Attending Homework is Free!")
![We’ve been really lucky. For a couple of years now, we’ve been able to do the work that we’ve wanted to do, make the kinds of changes that we want to see, and create a set of projects that have kept us interested in staying in Windsor. The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation wrapped up [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_2211-150x150.jpg "How to Briefly Describe Amazing Things: A Recap of 30 Days of SRSI")