Last Wednesday at The Green Corridor‘s Drive-thru Symphony event I showed a projection entitled Rolling Economy. This site-specific piece served as a digital representational count of the Windsor-Detroit border trade that passes through the corridor. The piece, which lasted about an hour, was visible to those in cars and trucks coming off of the Ambassador Bridge.
Interesting design idea from Brittany Veitch and Ben Landau using plants, laser-cut components, and a dystopian view of our future.
Bio-Accessories suggest a personal take on the responsibility of greening our cities, or at least our personal space within them, while imagining new and very personal relationships with ecology.
[via Inhabitat]
Day 2 of our trek to New York was filled with excellent adventures, some more great lectures, and lots of discussion. It was amazing to get to see some of the artists we’ve talked about before right here on the blog, and it continued to inform what we were continuing to try to define as our collective practice.
It’s already been five days since these pictures were taken, so I hope you’ll excuse my poor memory for some of what we saw.
In tandem with The Open Corridor and Drive-Through Symphony events, Green Corridor has also installed another exhibit, Open Community Video. This installation features videos from local students and community members. The videos are rear-projected through the front window of one of the The Green Corridor’s new Ecohouses located at 372 California Ave.
Open Community Video will take place Thursday (tonight!), September 24th from 8-10pm and Friday, September (tomorrow!) 25th from 8-10pm. If you have any short videos that you would like to contribute to this installment, just bring a dvd copy of it to the house tonight or tomorrow night!
TODAY in Windsor, there’s an incredible amount of activity happening. The Green Corridor will host a talk / workshop from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grant officers, two artist performances, and one huge outdoor event to bring culture to the NAFTA freeway.
Lee Rodney will launch her Border Bookmobile—a Windsor-made 1993 Plymouth Voyager stocked with a collection of artist books, theoretical texts, maps, and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world.
Jennifer Willet will conduct ongoing laboratory research and hold a bio-art workshop with the general public in the presentation of her work InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies. This piece explores the laboratory removed from its sterilized artificial setting and placed in an outside world full of environmental organisms and ecologies.
The Green Corridor along with composer Brent Lee, visual artist Sigi Torinus, Assumption High School musicians, What Seas What Shores, CJAM 91.5fm, and others will create a one-hour performance of music and visuals that interact with the passing traffic on Huron Church Road near the Pedestrian Overpass. Drivers can tune-in to the performance in near-realtime and contribute to the Drive-Thru Symphony by honking their horns, or revving their engines, or generally making noise. Broken City Lab will also be contributing through a number of projects by us as individuals.
Here’s the schedule:
1:00 – 2:30 – Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council / Integrated Arts Programs Information Session / Room 115 LeBel Building, University of Windsor
3:00 – 6:00 – Border Bookmobile, Lee Rodney / InsideOut: Labratory Ecologies, Jennifer Willet
8:00 – 9:30 – Drive thru Sympony Performance / Nature Bridge Pedestrian Overpass / Huron Church Rd. at Millen St.
This is going to be an amazing event, dare I say, history-making. You need to be there.
This week is Humanities Week 2009, presented by Humanities Research Group (HRG), and it’s focusing on urbanism, cities, and the past and the future of Windsor / Detroit.
Here’s the rundown of the events, which I copied / cut / pasted, so please excuse the list:
Tuesday 22 September • Philosophers’ Café 8pm • Phog Lounge, 157 University Avenue West – Come participate in a wide-ranging discussion concerning cities, their possible futures, and the future of Windsor with Justin Langlois [Broken City Lab], Tom Lucier [Phog, tomlucier.com], Melinda Munro [City of Windsor], and Jeff Noonan [Philosophy, University of Windsor]. Cash bar.
Wednesday 23 September • MASSH Lecture on the history of medicine in Windsor and Detroit, in a talk entitled “Border Cities Medicine: Towards a History of Medical Practitioners in Windsor.” Lecture 4.30pm • Room 1115, Medical Education Building, University of Windsor
Thursday 24 September • HRG Distinguished Speakers’ Series 7.30pm, Jerry Herron, professor of English and American Studies, Wayne State University, will give a talk entitled, “Borderama Detroit,” which will explore the city as a spectacle, and what Detroit, that ‘life-in-death’ city, means for the future of urban areas around the world. • Freed Orman Centre, Assumption University
Friday 25 September • HRG Colloquium 10am • Location to be communicated – “How Not to See Detroit: What Tourists Always Get Wrong When They Come to Look at Us, and What One Got Exactly Right” is a wide-ranging discussion with Jerry Herron about Detroit and the way it has been documented by the photographer Corine Vermeulen-Smith. Seating is limited; contact the HRG office for more information and to register.
There’s a lot going on this week, so contact HRG for more information on any specific part of the activity you see listed above, but plan to attend at least one of these events if your schedule permits!
We’re in New York for Conflux 2009 and we’re participating as part of Conflux City! We spent the first day catching up on some sleep, then venturing out into the city and touching base at Conflux HQ. There were a number of presentations we wanted to see, all of which helped us to start articulating some bigger questions we’ve been having about our own practice lately.
We’re scrambling right now to finish up our prep for our Algorithmic Subway Adventure at noon today (Sunday), so more details in the next posts later.
Welcome to the Neighbourhood took five groups of brave explorers on an adventure around West Windsor on Monday in order to highlight the potential to pay particular attention to the many things that usually go unnoticed in such a transient area.
Given that the neighbourhood surrounding the University of Windsor is made up mostly of student rental homes and the routes that many folks take to get to and from campus, inevitably we rarely get the chance to see some of the things that make this neighbourhood what it is.
So, two hours, three hundred photos, and many great stories later, our algorithmic walk was a huge success!
A quick warning, after the jump there’s thumbnails for the three hundred photos!!!
Continue reading “Welcome to the Neighbourhood Recap of Awesome Psychogeographic Exploration!!!”
Since we do have “access” to a fairly large river–one which separates us from Detroit, Michigan–a project such as Anne Percoco‘s “Indra’s Cloud” could work to highlight similar pollution issues in our area. Our river is not generally used for bathing, but the one pictured has been used for years and is now raising serious health concerns. Anne’s commentary on the issue came in the form of a raft consructed from used plastic bottles and bound with recycled labels, which were used as rope.
In her words, “I created a mobile public sculpture which brings to life a local myth and draws attention to the severely polluted condition of the Yamuna River.”
Back in July, Broken City Lab sent out a proposal to Conflux City 2009, which is a subset of the New York City festival for contemporary psychogeography, Conflux Festival. In August we found out that we were not only accepted into the festival, but we are also one of the featured projects of the program!
For the Conflux City 2009 program, we will be conducting psychogeographical urban research on the experiences of everyday life on the subways in New York through the activation of New York field agents. We will enlist the participation of numerous New Yorkers and visitors to the city to travel the subways and interact with their surroundings using a computer-generated algorithm that we create. This highly concentrated activity of paying attention to and disrupting the everyday on the New York subways will allow us to examine urban interactions in a well-functioning city.
In detail, participants are asked to bring their digital cameras to the walk. If they do not own a digital camera, the participants are still able to participate in the walk because we will be separating the field agents into groups, assuring there is at least one camera per section. We will provide the participants with a list of 25 randomly assembled steps in algorithmic form, and they will have a 2-hour timeslot with which to complete each of the 25 steps. We ask any one who is interested in our Algorithmic Subway Adventure to meet us at noon on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at Union Square Station.
Photographs from the Algorithmic Subway Adventures will allow us to visually review what it means to participate in personal and community engagement in a city that we imagine being the epitome of social urban functionality. Our interest in New York as a site of this research is situated in the city’s distinct difference to our city, where the scale of urban adventure and research is not only incredibly larger, but also occurring within an entirely different context, one that is critical for us to understand in our ongoing research.
