Last night was the second iteration of Cross-Border Communication where we sent a variety of messages from Windsor to Detroit. We started with “We’ve Missed You.”
We’ll be doing the final iteration of this suite of Cross-Border Communication tonight (Wednesday) around the usual time (8pm).
Continue reading “Cross-Border Communication: We’ve Missed You (and other things worth saying)”
Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way.
This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.
With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.
Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.
Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.
Tonight, we are going to perform the first iteration of Cross-Border Communication.
Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we have the equipment we need to realize this project.
Cross-Border Communication was initially imagined through a collaborative effort between Broken City Lab and students from the Vincent Massey Secondary School Junior Physics Club in Windsor, Ontario. The project will attempt to hijack and transform communicative efforts between Windsor and Detroit, which has historically been based solely on economic exchange.
The projection will begin at approximately 8pm near the foot of Ouellette Avenue and Riverside Drive in Windsor and will run for approximately 30 minutes. The projection will be visible from Detroit and from the edge of Windsor’s waterfront.
Last night Eric Boucher came to visit myself and my grandma Margaret Mongeau to interview her for Eric’s Micro-Residency with BCL.
Each fellow of BCL will be introducing Eric to a person whom he has never met. Eric then will be interviewing each person exclusively on the topic of Windsor.
Eric`s interview with my grandma was the first one, and it went extremely smooth and successful. Good footage was captured that will most likely lead the direction of the following interviews. Maraget spoke of times in Windsor during the depression and had extensive knowledge and insight on the history of our city.
Continue reading “Eric Boucher Micro-Residency Iteration 1/5”
Out of Mariele Neudecker‘s impressive body of work, her piece “Over and Over, Again and Again” hit me the most. This particular work is made from salt, water, and fiberglass and functions as a window into a small landscape. All three tanks line up to create an additive image. Besides being an optical masterpiece, this work is small but expansive simultaneously. I find it tough not to appreciate this level of technical mastery. Wouldn’t it be interesting to create a mini Windsor-in-a-cube?
Continue reading “Mariele Neudecker’s Over and Over, Again and Again”
This is the Terrafon, which is basically a huge turntable for the earth. Designed by artists Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke, the Terrafon premiered at the Volt Music Festival in Sweden.
The sound of the Terrafon is pretty much what you’d expect from something being dragged across the ground. The video does a good job at capturing the variations in sound, but mostly it’s the sounds of rocks or gravel being rubbed against something. It reminds me of when I was a kid and would drag things behind my bike.
The look of this thing is very cool and made me think of other ways to use something like this, rather than necessarily making it performative, what if there was something large and industrial-looking like this installed along the river, or at the entrance to old industrial buildings, what sounds would it make?
[via Inhabitat]
In case you haven’t already seen it floating around the interwebs, I had to post it.
Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.
This project, which I’ve posted about before, was developed using OpenFrameworks, a cross platform c++ library for creative development (somewhat similar to Processing, which uses Java as its base), is hugely inspiring. A project like this shifts the role of the artist / the programmer / the open-source advocate in a really interesting way.
Not that we have the technical skill base to develop anything near this in terms of software / hardware, but this project is a perfect example of why I still get excited by the idea of working in that medium.
Installed by medical students from Wayne State University at Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, The Detroit Medical Art Project seeks to highlight the lack of healthcare for many of Detroit’s residents.
Asking questions like, “How do you take care of your patients when the community is falling apart all around you?”, the students created the project from scavenged materials and donated equipment to depict a medical clinic that is so desperately needed in the area.
There’s a video in the Detroit Free Press article that features some quick, but good, interviews with the medical students who created the project, and shows some of the installation process. It’s interesting to know that type of discussion goes on in the classroom for medical training, and quite inspiring to see the kind of dialogue being generated through an installation.
[via Wooster Collective & Detroit Free Press]
In Philadelphia, an artist named Steve Powers is working alongside the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create this large-scale mural project that paints huge sentiments of love letters onto the sides of 50 buildings on one street.
The project is called A Love Letter For You and totally made me think that there might just be potential in murals after all.
Take a look at the project blog and read it from first post to the most recent, it really gives some great context to the project.
[via an email from Nathan]
Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.
This project, SMS Guerilla Projector, is about four years old, but it caught my eye while flipping through my copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book. The SMS Guerilla Projector does what you’re seeing above, basically project the screen image from a Nokia phone onto surfaces around the city. The project is somewhat reminiscent of the Image Fulgurator, which I posted on back in July of 2008.
Most speculation on the interwebs suggest it’s basically a hacked phone and slide projector mashed together, which is kind of ingenious in its simplicity. Basically, and LCD screen can have light pass through it and so by opening up a phone and shining some concentrated light at the screen, so the speculation goes, you would be able to project the image with a lens.
Some other notable and interesting projects of theirs that you should check out: The Tool for Armchair Activists, SMS Memory Wall, and Exploded Monologues.