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Call for Proposals: The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation

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.

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Drawdio: Audio Made by Drawing

Drawdio is a DIY music project by designer jay silver that let’s users draw the instrument of their choice on a piece of paper and play it with their finger.

While possible to use in a variety of  objects, when used with a pencil, the graphite acts as a circuit on the paper, transmitting the electric signal across the drawing to produce a different sound based on the specific form.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDaj3tBSM2M

If you can get past the sort of hilarious / awkward editing in the video, it’s a very cool and simple design. It makes me curious about the potential for creating some kind of traceable sound-map, what sounds would Detroit’s streets make versus Windsor’s streets? What would happen if you added new roads or buildings — what sound could that make?

[via Designboom]

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Making Lists: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope (Part 1)

Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above).

A part of this project involves us going around to each and every site on these lists and officially recognizing it as either a site of apology or a site of hope. Since we have 50 sites on our lists, we were beginning to run out of daylight on Sunday afternoon. That means that we only managed to visit about half of those sites, so we’re trying to find a second day to continue with our adventure.

We’ll post all of the photos from the event and a photo of every site we visit as soon as we finish!

The next Save the City event happens on March 20th, 2010 — more details soon.

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

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New Project Soon (Keep Your July Open)

Not that we don’t already have our hands full, but seeing as it’s nearly March, we’re starting to look ahead to summer time activities. These activities might be somewhat related to this ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the blog.

We’ll be posting more information soon, but for now, just know that if you’ve been planning on visiting Windsor, you should try to keep your calendars open in July.

And, hope to see you SUNDAY, February 28th – 1pm at 362 California!

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Arduino + LCD + PHP, Part 2

The epic adventure with Arduino, LCDs, and PHP continues. I’ve finally made some progress in terms of breaking up the words and lines appropriately. It felt like a huge achievement, since I had been trying to figure out this line-break thing for quite a while.

You can check the majority of the progress in the video below, and all of the steps along the way are below! Don’t mind the nonsensical example texts. So first off, I figured out I needed to send Arduino very specific information to know where to line break.

Continue reading “Arduino + LCD + PHP, Part 2”

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Trade School: Education Through Barter

OurGoods, an online barter network, is running a pop-up storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That storefront is called Trade School and it’s a series of classes that centralizes the act of barter and exchange and a pop up classroom in New York City’s Lower East Side.

It works like this: “Take a class every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs.”

We’ve written about this idea of informal education opportunities and spaces before and it remains a kind of long-term hope to see something like this get started in the area.

So, consider this just another post on the ongoing list of inspirational activities that we’d love to imagine having the time to pull off here in Windsor.

[via Eyebeam & PSFK]

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Vancouver [de]Tour Guide 2010

In a rather large-scale collaborative mapping project, artist Althea Thauberger and some of her colleagues are attempting to assemble an alternative tour guide, or rather, a (de)tour guide for visitors to Vancouver while the 2010 Olympic games are underway.

They set it up like this, “For us, it is vital to complicate the sanitized ‘best place on earth’ version of the city VANOC is officially promoting worldwide […] Since Google maps will be the information source of choice to visitors, we are interested in using it as a tool to critically contextualize the city during this high-profile period.”

Exploring the map provides a wide variety of points of interest, some quite interesting, others less so. The map seems to provide the most engaging information when acting as guide to local activist history, with those markers providing some spatial context for what’s happened as a grassroots political level over the last number of years (though it would be interesting to see those in relation to current Olympic-occupied places). However, as a whole, the map is a bit too unfocused to provide any really useful or critical information (and perhaps as a disinformation campaign acting in opposition to the Olympics’ official maps and points of interest, it is most successful).

Conceptually, the goal of the project to reach the front pages of Google when one searches for things to do in Vancouver is quite intriguing — I can imagine that nearly all other information one might come into contact with while in the city during this time will be stamped as an official 2010 Olympics piece of merchandise — it may be that adding suggested routes for specifically-themed tours might be a way for providing some organizational structure for all of this information.

[via an email from Josh, who we met at the Propeller show]