Many regular readers of Windsor Visuals have been asking, “What has that creative research group, Broken City Lab, up to lately”?
Broken City Lab, a University of Windsor-based collective of artists, designers and modern-day explorers, best known perhaps for their Text-in-Transit creation on Windsor City Buses, began the schoolyear and a return to local projects with a psychogeographic walk through west Windsor on Monday night.
Not familiar with psychogeography? UTNE.com defines it as “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”
Windsor has been an epicentre for psychogeographic walks in the past year. The first was hosted by Tom Lucier of Phog “The Big Walk”, another hosted by ScaleDown.ca, InternationalMetropolis.com and Spacing.ca in December 2008, and followed by several other step-by-step adventures through Windsor.
Broken City Lab conducted Monday’s walk to introduce folks to explore the neighbourhoods surrounding the University of Windsor.
Of the 20 or so people who attended, groups were formed, and each group was assigned a specific walking algorithm. Courses took each group to various locations in all directions, each with a goal to take one photo of the assigned task.
After thirty tasks some of which included finding the nearest abandoned home, the closest street marked ‘boulevard’, a significant pothole or an overgrown lawn, walkers returned to the Broken City Lab house on California Ave. to download their photos for placement on the BCL blog.
The walk oriented people to the University neighbourhood and inspired thought about often disregarded visuals and views of daily life and Windsor’s urban landscape.
Check out the Broken City Lab site for the results to be posted in the next day or two.
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