…For the Save The City Micro Tool Kit! It will be distributed at our last event for Save The City, this Friday May 21st @ 7pm @ the Art Gallery of Windsor. A downloadable and printable version will also be available here, soon!
The kit will include recipes to cook up some BCL-like civic engagement in your city!
Remember:
Though we’ve received a few of the postcards back because of a faulty address, for the most part, the 150 postcards sent out for Things Worth Saving, as part of our ongoing Save the City project, have likely now arrived to their destinations.
I must admit that when I first laid eyes on the stacks upon stacks of postcards that we were fill and mail out that evening I yearned for my San Pellegrino to immaculately transform into Kentucky bourbon. Alas it did not, but thankfully that seemingly desperate moment revealed itself as fleeting as the lovely people who attended the event feverishly jot down their various anecdotes, love stories, musings and mini manifestos regarding Windsor. The writing was non stop – the sounds of the building and camera snaps were overpowered by the sounds of pencils, pens and markers scribbling effervescently.
We’ve tossed around the idea of engaging in some form of reverse graffiti in Windsor for quite a while now. I assume there must be a few Windsor buildings dirty enough for a nice contrast-heavy design. Any suggestions? I think the Hiram Walker storage facilities near Russel Woods are covered with a black residue, but the premises are private and probably inaccessible. Apparently there are no laws prohibiting reverse graffiti in this part of South Africa. I wonder if we have any? I’d like to find out!
Be it resolved that we’ll be a lot more active on here starting now.
We’ve been overly involved in communicating on Google Wave while trying to keep our brains together for Save the City. With that project winding down, we’ll be shifting more of our research and communications back on here. We’ve missed it.
And Josh said it best when he suggested that we should’ve been using the blog instead of Google Wave the entire time. He’s completely right.
Using that fancy collaborative tool that Google seemed to suggest would be the future of email never really fit into our work flow all that well, but it seemed the most convenient for having notes and research in one place. At first, maybe kidding ourselves, we thought it would do away with multiple emails back and forth, but then we kept forgetting to check our waves, so then we opted-in to receive emails when a Wave had been updated, and so it became really no better than a bunch of emails and some Google documents.
We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. We seem to lose so much in translation from discussions to the next time we meet up or begin working on something new. Should we be saving Word documents to Dropbox? I know Cristina and I have been using it to pass photos back and forth and its fairly convenient, though we haven’t tried working on the documents from there — I suppose we’re using it as a glorified FTP. Google Docs kind of works, but is somewhat annoying to have documents in two places (as I don’t think anyone is really truly committing to the cloud yet). What do you use when you’re working on something with someone else? How do you resolve multiple files with the same names?
With our goal (really this time) of trying to put together some kind of publication soon(ish), what’s going to be the best way to keep ourselves on the same page, or at the very least, merge everything together at the very end?
Any regular readers — what’s your method(s) for collaborating online? BCL, any suggestions for how we should move forward with this?
Although it’s been a while since I last worked on this project, things are continuing to move along. I finally assembled the Ladyada XBee adapters and successfully passed a message between the two XBees.
So, I’m not the best solderer and the first adapter I worked on suffered from an overusing tip on my soldering iron, which made heating up the solder with the tip of the iron next to impossible. There were also some issues (that remain unresolved) in terms of configuring the XBees, but thankfully that step seems to be unnecessary (at this point anyways).
Danielle, Rosina, Michelle, and I were up in Guelph over the weekend as part of the Kazoo festival, leading a workshop on making those magnetic planters we were working on last summer .
The workshop was a lot of fun and I thought I’d post a few photos of some of the more abitious designs and fun installations of the planters in downtown Guelph. The “lookin’ good” planter above didn’t last more than five minutes — when we returned to where we put it, it was already gone.
Another planter hiding in a kind of forgotten garden. Taking a quick walk around the neighbourhood surrounding Ed Video (where we had the workshop), and putting up these planters was a lot of fun — we need to find some more time for pedestrian scale exploration in Windsor again.
Another planter with an ambitious design on the parking meter. Thanks for having us, Kazoo, and thanks for coming out to play with us, Guelph! Making these is a lot of fun, so easy, and we still have some that survived from last summer. Maybe doing another workshop at some point is in order…
So, we’ve been busy working on the final parts of some of the Save the City projects, in particular, pulling together the postcards for this month’s Things Worth Saving (April 27th, remember?!)
We wound up with around 65 photographs submitted by some fellow Windsorites of the things that they think are worth saving in the city. We’re planning to write a lot of short letters on the back of these postcards and then sending them out to cities across the country (p.s. you’re invited to help!!!)
Danielle and I have also been out finishing up documenting and officially recognizing the Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope across the city.
You should expect a massive post on this soon… visiting 50 sites across the city takes a lot longer than we anticipated! We’re also trying to figure out where to host our final event of the Save the City project in May — any suggestions?
Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
We’ve noted before that we’re working on a proposal for CAFKA, as we’re interested in the border between Kitchener and Waterloo. Though certainly every place is bordered with another, it’s the kind of K-W relationship that intrigues us, as we’re wondering about the potential possibilities in thinking about Windsor and Detroit as D-W.
We’re wondering about examining the process of instigating a formality that addresses one’s existence in a bordered-region that (at least from the outside) imagines itself as one coherent region to attempt to, in the first instance, create an analogy to the way that the border-complex exists here with the increasingly arduous reality of crossing the border between Windsor and Detroit, and in the second instance, imagine that changing this was as simple as creating a one-stop office to attain a regional dual-citizenship card / document / visa of some sort.
This also extends into our increasing focus in unfolding what shapes locality, and perhaps, by overlaying local concerns over other places, we might find new ways of thinking about the way locality is created here in Windsor.
Plus, we’re really interested in building some thing soon.
TODAY is the last day to submit to the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation. If you’ve already submitted, rest-assured that we have received your proposal.
We’ll be sending out one big email to acknowledge all submissions sometime tomorrow and then we’ll proceed to go through all of them and narrow them down hopefully within a couple weeks.
If we need any images or your CV or anything like that attached to your email submission as supplementary information — if we need it, we’ll ask you for it in a followup email. We just want your amazingly great ideas at this point!!!
SUBMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
Zeke Moores makes badass metal sculptures from metal. He does this in Windsor; we’re lucky to have him (and his partner, Lucy, who we’ve written about before) in this city.
He has an extensive background in metal fabrication and working in a foundry, and he teaches at the University of Windsor. His work explores the social and cultural economies of everyday objects, and in particular, his Bronze Dumpster is going to be testing some of those economies as it slowly travels to alleyways across the city over the course of the summer.
Hopefully we’ll get to play with Zeke and Lucy sometime soon.