This one goes out to Josh, our resident wood worker.
Steve Lambert on video making his latest work, 98.5%. From his vimeo page, “While this video only takes three and a half minutes, the actual sign took several days to make. Victoria Estok and Kyle Hittmeier helped along the way – Kyle can be seen painting, Victoria is more elusive. The soundtrack is from some old friends.”
This reminds me that we need to make more stuff.
[via MAKE]
OX works on billboards across Paris, France to disrupt perspectives, commercial aesthetics, and daily encounters with forever-scaling urban signage.
The artist has sent us a few emails in the past, so I’m happy to finally be able to post about it. You should check out OX’s site featuring a huge number of works and on the Poster Time blog. Many of the interventions are quite playful, other times being rather loud with oscillating colours and lines.
Having just arrived back from the Creative Cities Summit, and hearing a really incredible presentation by the organizers of the Philadelphia Mural Arts project (which we’ve posted about before), I’m feeling rather anxious to consider how we could transform the many, many surfaces across the city that intensify the sense of non-place that seems endemic to Windsor.
I’ve made some really great progress on this ongoing Arduino + LCD project over the last couple of weeks — some of the two larger hurdles are now out of the way, the results of which you can see in the video above.
Since the video was shot, I’ve improved the PHP script some more to ensure that the text is properly broken up over the appropriate lines on the LCD and I’ve also removed those strange characters, which were resulting from newlines in the Twitter RSS feed, I think.
Continue reading “Parsing RSS Feeds for the Arduino + LCD + PHP project”
Iga Janik is an artist, curator, and the director of Artspace in Peterborough. We got to hang out with her back in October for about a week. It was awesome, and now we get to hang out again, but this time, in Windsor.
For her Micro-Residency, Iga will be bringing some micro radio transmitters, which you can see above. We’re not sure what she’ll do with them over the course of the weekend, but their signals can be picked up by car radios, and hanging out in a parking lot or bugging a city block could be a lot of fun.
However, for Iga, the important part of all of this is what transmitters can do, not how they do it. Consider us very excited!!!
If you want to catch up with Iga, send us a note, we’ll get you connected.
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 the things that make Windsor the city that it is — hyper-localized pronunciations and all. That idea, in particular, spurred a 2-hour conversation on a local radio station, and a great article in the Windsor Star on Monday, which was just a bonus after being able to spend the afternoon immersed in folklore and great company.
We’re a little over halfway through the Save the City project, but there’s still a lot more to come, so if you’ve been meaning to come out, but haven’t had the chance yet, check back soon, as we’ll be posting the date for April’s event any day now.
I haven’t posted for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on the ongoing Arduino + LCD project, which is moving along towards connecting external data to be displayed on the LCD screen.
The last bit of time I’ve put into the project has been focused on printing text to the LCD screen from a text file. It’s an easy enough process using a PHP serial class that I mentioned in the last post, combined with PHP’s basic file manipulation functions.
Continue reading “Working on the PHP Backend of the Arduino + LCD Project”
Friday night meetings have been hard to pull together over the last little while. Managing to fit together six different schedules can seem next to impossible sometimes, so it’s all the more fun when we can actually pull it off and all be in the same room at the same time.
We caught up on the recently launched Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, the upcoming Save the City event, and some ideas for the proposal we’re hoping to put together for CAFKA.
Josh and Rosina had been working on some ideas for our proposal, the idea of looking at the border-zone, so to speak, between Kitchener and Waterloo. They had been looking up the role of embassies.
72 Hours is an audiovisual intervention comprised of a series of video projections evoking the personal histories of neighborhood residents, which will be seen through the building’s windows, and one unit will be opened to the public for a walk-through sound installation that evokes lives of former owners. You can see some of the projections above, as installed in a gallery.
The houses in question, clustered together in the space of a city block, are owned by Deutsche Bank and other international banks. During the Block Rebellion, demands will be made to immediately cease all no-fault post-foreclosure evictions and begin negotiations to sell back the vacant units at real value.
According to the artist, John Hulsey, “the projections serve as injunctions, insertions into contested areas of the city. Transforming private neighborhoods into public arenas for debate, the projections may create spaces in which dialogue can be breached.”
It’s an interesting project, makes me wonder about the possibilities for Grace Hospital — certainly, a different set of issues, but at the very least, this is an interesting example of highlighting contentious spaces.
[via Groundswell Collective]
Danielle first wrote about the Gmail ad phenomenon a while ago — that is, how Google tries to place relevant ads by reading your emails and the curiosities that can arise from that technique.
So, the screenshot above is what Google thinks about an email regarding Broken City Lab, Bruce Mau, a revisited idea, and our new upcoming residency project.
The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation invites the radical re-imagining of the possibilities for economic stimulus and process-driven practice, situating those very possibilities in the heart of Windsor in vacant storefronts.
Facilitated by Broken City Lab, the Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation will call on artists, writers, designers, entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, hobby shops, restauranteurs, librarians, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010.
The residencies will attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a population of people who are continually losing hope for their city.
Details: We will provide a space for you to use, some very modest fees and resources to pull off your project, and a lot of enthusiasm. While we are open to proposals from anyone, preference will be given to Ontario-based persons. If you’re an artist working in a socially-engaged practice, we’d be especially interested to hear from you. Any questions: info@brokencitylab.org.
Deadline: April 15, 2010
The residencies will take place here in Windsor, Ontario in June and July 2010.
Please use the form below to make your proposal.
P.S. You don’t need to write a 20-page proposal, but give us the details that are most pertinent. It would be really helpful to know how long you’d like to use the space, what your activity or project will look like, how you think it’s innovative, and why you think it could do some good in our fair city.
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Submissions are now closed.
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This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.
