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Numen/For Use’s Tape Installation

Ever wonder what 530 rolls of self-adhesive tape would look like if you used it to create a spiderweb? It would probably look much like Numen/For Use‘s Tape Installation in Odeon, Vienna. While I always appreciate projects that are so ambitious and visually stunning, I’m growing wary of excessive waste. Clear packing tape is, for the most part, not recyclable (due to its adhesive) and using 530 rolls for a temporary project is a bit tough for me to grasp.

While I don’t mean to sound like a worrier, I’m just concerned about projects that are so overwhelming to the viewer that he or she can’t stop for a minute to think about the implications of production. We (BCL) have used plastic products in some of our projects in the past, but questions about waste were usually addressed. The most I can hope for is that artists keep asking these important questions when they decide to take refined materials and transform them.

There are a couple of images of this massive installation after the jump.

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The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation: Launching June 11, 2010

For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place in need of new imagination.

We’ve been planning this for months, and we’re incredibly excited to see it finally launch this Friday, June 11, 2010.

Michelle will be posting constantly for the next month, and we’ll be noting the open and close times for each day soon. In the meantime,  feel free to download the entire schedule in PDF.

The Schedule: All projects take place in either 406, 410 or 424 Pelissier Street in downtown Windsor.

Participants

Dates

Project Description

Daragh Sankey
 (Toronto, ON)

June 10 – 13

June 17 – 20

June 25 – July 11

How To Make a Documentary: Live documentation of the residency in its entirety/video editing workshops.

Jolie Inthavong
 (Windsor, ON)

June 11 –17

The Breakroom: A Profit-Free Cafe and Lunch.

Eric Cheung
(Toronto, ON)

June 11 – 21

Creation of an interior urban green park.

Andrea Carvalho
 (Montreal, QC)

June 11 – 21

A series of actions and tactics challenging Windsor-specific Non-Places.

Julie René de Cotret & Jefferson Campbell-Cooper
(Guelph, ON)

June 11 – 23

The Peoples Museum & Fabulations de Windsor: Bilingual community-based story telling and story gathering.

Sara French
 (Vancouver, BC)

June 11 – July 8

Norman Eberstein: An interactive, live performance involving surveillance cameras and a security guard at work.

Nicole Grinstead
 (Montreal, QC)

June 13 – 19

Swap Shop.

Jodi Green
(Windsor, ON)

June 14 – 25

The Sweater Factory: process-based performance involving the unraveling and re-assembly of sweaters.

(Department of Unusual Certainties)
 (Toronto, ON)

June 15 – July 11

Storefront Success Stories: Based on admiration for the local shopkeeper, the project aims to create new connections, knowledge, and theories between Windsor’s different businesses, people, and sites of productivity.

Kero (Windsor, ON / Detroit, MI)

June 17 – 20

An interactive motion-sensored installation engaging outside pedestrians and interior viewers.

Leesa Bringas (Windsor, ON)

June 18 – 30

Collaborative letter-writing campaign to vacant homes on Indian Road.

Stephen Surlin (Windsor, ON

June 20 – 29

An experimenting / prototyping / recording research phase for the collecting of urban sounds through contact microphones.

Terre Chartrand, Garth Rennie, Zoey Heath, Phil Beaudoin
 (Windsor, ON & Kitchener / Waterloo, ON)

June 20 – 27

A visual exchange between Kitchener-Waterloo and Windsor: a ride down the highway dialog through photographic and sound experience.

Lea Bucknell
 (BC/London, ON)

June 22 – July 1

June 30, 7pm (opening)

Community-shaped, Interactive Interior garden space.

Thea Jones
(Montreal, QC)

June 23 – 26

Multimedia installation using process-based research of the Detroit-Windsor bridge and tunnel which cross the Detroit River.

Thom Provost
 (Windsor, ON)

June 24 – 30

Storefront projection installation using Google Street View stills of Windsor.

Denise St Marie
 (Toronto, ON)

June 25 – 27

Talk To Strangers: a text-based outdoor window installation.

Ayesha Drouillard & Nicolette Westfall
 (Windsor, ON)

June 27, 28, July 4, 5 (workshops), July 7-8 (show)

IMAGINATION LAB: walk-in art workshops for kids accompanied by their caregivers.

Merry Ellen Scully Mosna
(Windsor, ON)

June 28 – 29

Portraits, Pies and Peace: Sunday afternoon discussions, and sharing of homemade pie, plus some drawing and painting.

Logan Davis
(Windsor, ON)

June 28 – July 1

Interactive Light Board Window Installation.

Robin Fitzsimons
 (Toronto, ON)

June 28 – July 2

Donation-based in-store training to improve gambling skills – geared towards subverting the economy in Windsor.

Doodle Heads: Elizabeth Prosser & Nicolette Westfall
 (Windsor, ON)

June 29, 30 (workshops),

July 1-July 3 (show)

Graffiti Workshops and Showing.

Joshua Babcock
 (Windsor, ON)

June 29 – July 11

Invention and Solution Hub (ISH): ongoing brainstorming and mapping activity.

Brad Tinmouth
 (Toronto, ON)

June 30 – July 2

Pro-Click Factory: digital, interactive open-mic nights. An evening lecture and their techniques for cultivating the best YouTube videos.

Laura Paolini
 (Toronto, ON)

July 1 – 11

Bell Payphone Labs: PL1999 and GMBLL. Payphone intervention workshops.

And And Collective
(Waterloo, ON)

July 3 – 11

The Amalgamated City of W: Imagined merging of Windsor and Waterloo through campaign office meetings, consultations and presentations.

Lee Rodney
(Windsor, ON)

July 5 – 8

Border Bookmobile: A reading station.

Emily Colombo
(Sault Ste. Marie, ON)

July 5 – 10

Multiple public Interventions based on analysis of debt-accumulation, poverty, city-beautification, and community engagement.

This project is generously supported by the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, Arts Council Windsor & Region, Windsor Pride, and the Ontario Arts Council.

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Christian Boltanski’s No Man’s Land

Have you ever sat back and contemplated how much ‘stuff’ you use on a weekly, even daily basis? Do you consider clothing to be items of utility or a means to show others what type of person you are? These are a couple of the questions I imagine Christian Boltanski is trying to address with his work No Man’s Land. “This sprawling piece is centered around a 30-ton mass of clothes that is picked up and dropped — in an act of abject futility — by a massive, industrial crane. All around are tidy squares of used clothing, illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights. […] The dire industrial backdrop keeps things suitably grim.” There is a strong message of life and death here also.

Via: C-Monster

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Later Nights, since it’s summer now

Michelle and I spent hours and hours together yesterday. With everyone’s schedules fairly ridiculous at the moment, we’re trying to steal what little time we can to keep working. Lately, the time that we’ve all spent together has been framed exclusively almost exclusively by planning for Save the City or organizing the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, and so we’re usually burned out after a couple hours of that. Last night though, we pushed past the moment of getting burned out, and I think we got somewhere because of it.

We started our Friday night with a Skype call to Chris from the Department of Unusual Certainties regarding their project as part of the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation (they are very enthusiastic, and their projects is going to be really, really great), had some dinner, tried to imagine what will come after SRSI, and then moved on to sorting out the billboards for the last part of Save the City.

We had a lot of bad ideas. Had we stopped earlier on, today and tomorrow would have been filled with some scrambling efforts to find the finish the design, emailing it out to everyone, trying to integrate everyone’s suggestions (and likely failing to do it well), sending it out again, getting more input, etc., etc., etc. Not entirely effective, nor can that process really capture the really great sparking moments of working together in the same room (the reason, I love collaborative work).

We really want these billboards to not just cap off Save the City, not just describe or some how summarize what we’ve learned, but continue with this conversation that we’ve been having. So, we had some terrible ideas for a long while, but we moved through them, we wrote them all down, then crossed them all out eventually, and it was the process of doing that, of really talking about where we were trying to go without knowing where we were going that was entirely worth it. I think we started the billboard brainstorming around 7:30pm were ready to give up around 9pm and we were there until 11pm still finalizing things. And, they’re still not finalized yet, but they’re close.

And we didn’t just brainstorm, we did the preliminary layout(s) together, we critiqued as we went, and it was so completely worth the exhaustion. Danielle called, thankfully, so we could check our work with someone outside of that room to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious, and then we were done, and we’re very, very excited to see these go up.

I hope the summer allows more opportunities for this — a lot of time spent together doing things, working through problems together, in the same room, until we get somewhere better than where we started.

The artwork goes out Monday, and I think the billboards launch mid-month.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Postopolis!

Imagine a marathon of idea sharing. Now imagine this marathon was held on the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. This is basically the idea behind Postopolis. “It is a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design.” What if we were able to host an event of this size on a Windsor roof? I think the unconventional location of an event like this probably breaks people out of familiarity and keeps their minds thinking creatively. For this reason, I think more creative events should be held in odd locations.

Via We Make Money, Not Art

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A Toolkit for Saving a City

Though we have a lot more to say about Save the City than I’ll attempt right now, you should know that we put together a toolkit that describes the processes we figured out throughout the last five months. We put together a nice one-page fold up list of instructions, so to speak, for how one might take on similar tactics in (re)discovering their city, neighbourhood, block, or apartment building.

Cristina wrote about the process a while back, and the toolkits turned out really, really, really well. Soon, we’ll be posting a downloadable PDF.

The event last Friday was awesome. We had a really good turn out, we got to talk about and see (really for the first time) everything we’ve been doing so far this year all lined up together. Have we come to any conclusions? I’m not sure, but I know that we’ve begun to articulate some of the questions we’ve had for a long time, a little bit better.

We’re hoping to put together a book by the end of the summer about all of this (and by all of this, I mean Save the City). We need to devote some time to really digging into discussing what the project has been and how it unfolded. In the meantime, we still have some billboard space to fill, expect to see some photos of those in the coming weeks. As well, we still need to put together a map for Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope. So, lots to do, and all while we prepare for the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation!!!

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Making Sense of Big Group Calendars

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 for display, but that’s sort of low on the priority list.

Danielle and I were on a panel with InCUBATE last week as part of Open Engagement, where they spoke about their radical arts admin practice. Making calendars, planning schedules, revising budgets, and organizing so many people / spaces / ideas certainly makes me wonder about what we’re doing now that could actually help inform other projects. How do we keep track of the tactics we’re using to pull off SRSI that could be discussed alongside our other projects? Or is this just part of the process of pulling together another project?

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2 Million &1AD

Let’s get this out of the way: I am a sucker for scientific art, period. This particular work, a fossilization machine, was created for the Tatton Biennial by Austin Houldsworth. He is attempting to use this machine to create fossils in a matter of months, a process that usually takes thousands of years and requires specific circumstances to be present. According to his project description, “the project starts with the attempt to petrify both a Tatton-grown pineapple and pheasant, and conclude when it is a human that ends up fossilised.”

Via: We Make Money, Not Art

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XBees, Arduinos, Serial Data

I made some huge progress over the last week or so on this ongoing Arduino / LCD project — it’s finally gone wireless!

With some more silly mistakes behind me, I’m finally getting a better handle on how to break down the problems I run into and solve them a lot faster. I remember back in February, it seemed as though it was going to be impossible to actually get this wireless part happening, so I’m super relieved to know it’s at least partly working.

Also, there have been people asking for the code used in this project (in terms of PHP and Arduino scripts), I will upload them! I just haven’t had the time to go through and appropriately clean them up and comment them, so I’m not sure how useful they would be at this point. I just wanted to note that I will indeed be doing that soon though!

Lots of photos of wireless glory ahead…

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Getting things done!

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 Micro Tool-Kits that will also be distributed THIS Friday night.  We did everything from editing the recipes, to creating a layout, to drawing little doodles, and we’re very excited to share them with you!  While Rosina and I were busy working away on one end of the table, Josh and Michelle were just as busy on the other end organizing and creating a calendar and list of needs for all the SRSI participants.

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