Tag Archives: Broken City Lab

Interview With Broken City Lab

January 27, 2011 – 11:30 am

Recently one of the senior research fellows at the local artist/activist group Broken City Lab named Josh Babcock interviewed me about my current gallery show “Artist As Activist” on at the Lebel Gallery on the University of Windsor Campus.

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.

The processes of Broken City Lab remain grounded in the lab’s observations and concerns about Windsor, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city.

Broken City Lab’s creative activity is rooted in community-based social practice, where the lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace.

You can READ THE ARTICLE HERE.

By Stephen Surlin | Posted in Press | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Stephen Surlin’s Windsor Star Interview

January 27, 2011 – 11:20 am

Stephen Surlin, a University of Windsor arts student displays his rechargeable solar powered LED lamp Wednesday January 19, 2011. The piece is part of an exhibit Surlin will present at the Lebel Gallery at the school.

Photograph by: Dan Janisse, The Windsor Star

University of Windsor artist’s gallery showing inspired by humanitarian trip to Nigeria

BY SONJA PUZIC, THE WINDSOR STAR JANUARY 20, 2011

An eye-opening trip to Nigeria with a humanitarian organization is the inspiration behind a local young artist’s latest exhibit.

Stephen Surlin, a 24-year-old University of Windsor visual arts student, will showcase his latest work at the university’s LeBel Gallery next week.

The exhibit, entitled Artist as Activist, opens Monday and will feature what Surlin calls activism design projects, including a solar powered rechargeable LED lamp. His work combines installations, audio, video, painting, photography and sculpture.

Surlin, who works with the local artist collective Broken City Lab and has been involved with Artcite’s Fringe Festival and the Fahrenheit Festival, said he was inspired by new design and technology ideas as they relate to impoverished nations like Nigeria.

“After my trip to Nigeria … I did a lot of research on the idea of architecture as activism,” Surlin said. Many of the people he met in the West African country were very interested in technology and electronics, although they had limited access to it. At the same time, they lacked basic necessities – proper medical care, HIV/AIDS treatment and eyeglasses.

Surlin travelled to Nigeria with the AIDS Crisis Response Team, a non-profit organization that provides direct medical services, medications and education to people in developing countries affected by the disease.

“I handed out a lot of glasses there. I had people telling me they wanted to be able to thread a needle, see better,” he said.”I was also a documentarian during the trip.”

Surlin said he hopes to raise awareness of social and humanitarian crises through contemporary art and engage people in discussions about social activism.

Lizzy Walker, director of the AIDS Crisis Response Team, will join Surlin for his exhibit’s closing reception Jan. 28 at 7 p.m. at the gallery, located in the visual arts building at Huron Church Road and College Avenue. She will talk about her work with the organization.

For more information, visit Surlin’s website, stephensurlin.com or check him out on Facebook.

spuzic@windsorstar.com

By Stephen Surlin | Posted in Activism, Press | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Window Microphone

January 7, 2011 – 7:41 pm

Window Microphone

Window Microphone

Piezo disc, breadboard, wire and recording equipment

Stephen Surlin 2010

This project was part of Broken City Lab‘s “Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation” which took place between June 11 and July 11, 2010. I entered the project with an impromptu idea to use some of the minimalist audio recording technology I had been working with, especially the piezoelectric disc.

“For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place in need of new imagination.”

-Broken City Lab

My process called upon the ethos of the Broken City Lab by literally and metaphorically “listening” to the city through a piezoelectric disc attached to the window, which turns the entire window into a large microphone. The vibrations that the large diaphragmatic window catches is turned into an electrical frequency that can be amplified and heard/recorded.

The amplified sound could be listened to by any of the visitors of the storefront during open hours. This invites the audience to engage with the city in a different way. The audio characteristics of this microphone mainly picks up the low rumbly frequencies of distant busses and the piercing tone of birds and footsteps, sometimes the faint murmur of talking could be heard when small groups would collect outside of the storefront windows.

By Stephen Surlin | Posted in Installation | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
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