Change in Plans

As we explained in our very first post, we are only living in Winnipeg for two and a half months. Unfortunately, with my work term ending and our flight date approaching, we’re packing up and saying our last goodbyes. Our last day in Winnipeg was rainy, we packed up our apartment with the windows open, listening to the rain and The Weakerthans on our laptop. Saying goodbye to the city and the people we’ve encountered was harder then expected. Our project has immersed us unexpectedly into Winnipeg’s essence, that leaving it for our own hometown seemed strange. Pulling down our six foot map from our apartment wall, was like closing the door on the field research portion of our project.

We’re back home in Montreal now, and we’re trying to fit ourselves back into our old routines and lifestyles. Since, Immony and I do not live together in Montreal it’s been a little difficult trying to jump start our project outside of Winnipeg. Our first plan of action, was to visit the Concordia University library. There we picked up books on; public art, grassroots, community projects, and Winnipeg architecture.

What we need now is to find a working space/studio to act as a home-base for the “Can you hear the city whispering?” project. We cleared out and cleaned up the basement of my mom’s house. We set up a table, blackboard, our map and some of our field research. It’s time to start chipping away at creating the travel guide.

-Maegan

After a meeting with hannah_g, from AceArt.inc. She guided us in the direction of the Tallest Poppy and offered us an Artist residency for the day. After enjoying one of the best brunches we have ever had, we got to work. We posted photos of the locations on the wall along with pictures of the original flyers, and a map with all 445 points. Please visit the Tallest Poppy Residency website.

We didn’t expect the residency to take it’s current shape and form. Making the shift from darkroom photography and video production to this exploration of Winnipeg’s cityscape has brought up a whole new set of questions to the table. We decided to direct our concerns outward and get some direct feedback from the public sphere, and we now have an opportunity to present our results.

From the beginning of our stay here we’ve been interested in an event titled “My city’s still breathing” This symposium will gather international experts to deliberate and debate the current and future relationships of art and design to city-making, taking into concern issues of the environment and sustainability. The documentation of this symposium will be published as a Cultural Capitals legacy event – an important contribution to urban development in Canada. We are quite grateful and excited to be speaking at the symposium. We cannot wait to be returning to Winnipeg in November!

Please visit our section on the Arts for All website for further information:
Description of Immony Men and Maegan Broadhurst’s talk

After exploring the city and taking over 2000 photos of selected sites, it was time to regroup. We brainstormed and tried to find a way for the project to come full circle. With the abundant amount of information collected about the sites, we needed to find a way for it to be organized and presentable to the viewer. We have decided that the final product of this project, will be a travel guide. Fitting this project into a book format is ideal for the material we have collected. It will steer away from traditional travel guides in the sense that the book will be geared towards the people who reside in Winnipeg, rather then tourists. Our dynamic layout will include photos, first person accounts, and illustrations, making it more playful then commercial guides.

We also finally got around to naming this project. At this point it it has been under our residency name (Change in Plans), but we have now named it: “Can you hear the city whispering?”. This will also be the title of the travel guide.  The name originated from the fact that when working in our apartment, the sounds of the city would leak through our windows, and be ever present while we work.

As a gesture of appreciation, we decided to post a final round of posters up in the locations of the originals. The poster was again a map of winnipeg, but this time all 445 sites were visible. Letting the public know what sites they have chosen as a community.

In addition to our large map we’ve decided to create a database for the spots and use Google Earth as a platform for mapping out the locations. The red markers are the disliked areas and the green indicate the liked areas. We’ve entered a total of 445 locations and are now ready to visit sites. This brings us to the next step which is photographing the selected spaces and taking down notes of our findings.

At first we weren’t too sure how accurate the markers were and what we were looking for besides street names and identifiable buildings/establishments. We combed up and down the city following our map and after our first day we discovered it was quite easy to notice what were the negative or positive attributes of each site. Below are a couple of pictures from our location scouting.

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Compiling our Findings from Change in Plans (Winnipeg) on Vimeo.

Posting markers on our giant map was fun times. We’ve been thinking about the effort people have put into sharing their favourite and disliked spots of Winnipeg with us. As we go through the numerous posters we begin to see clusters of red and green dots pinning down common places such as the international airport, the civic centre, and the forks. There are strong emotions placed towards parks and they are either liked or disliked. Collecting this data has familiarized us with street names and the layout of the city space. We don’t think as tourists we would ever find a reason to wander these areas…but we’re going to.

We’re pretty excited with the response we’ve been getting from our posters. We saw results even on the first day that they were up. Some of them were torn down due to the Jazz Festival clean up, but no biggie. The more successful posters were the ones located at bus stops and street corners at busy intersections. Tracking them down and  documenting the posters has become a daily routine and a pleasant surprise. It’s almost like we’ve created our own geocache system for ourselves. It’s quite amazing that some printed posters and colored stickers can give us an idea of which parts of the city people like and dislike…Now it’s time to sort all of this out and make something out of it.

- Immony and Maegan

[View with PicLens]

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Paper Trail from Change in Plans (Winnipeg) on Vimeo.

So today was the day we hit the streets with our printed posters and some packing tape. At first we wanted to cover a large area of the downtown core and try to include Osborne Village, we changed our minds midway and decided to focus on a smaller area as an initial dry-run. We posted flyers where we thought there would be heavy traffic circulation: bus stops, coffee shops, pubs, etc.

We are a bit worried about them getting torn down or ignored. I guess it’s part of the experiment, if our first run doesn’t work we’ll have to go back to the drawing board and figure something else. We used my iPhone to mark the exact location of each flyer so we can track them down and collect the results. Include in this blog post is the map with each flyer’s location, if you would like to take a visit. We’re quite excited to see how passerbys will respond to the project.

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We wanted a simple, accessable, commitment free,way to adress the public with our questions. We decided that the best way to invite locals to interact with a map of thier city, would be through a flyer format. This way anyone could appraoch the flyer on thier own account and present thier information. It was a simple way that asked the participant to engage with our work in the present, and did not require them to visit a website, email us, or take any time out of their schedule to answer. So we set to work designing the flyer. We wanted to make the map to include as much of Winnipeg as possible, while still having the street names legible. Next we wanted to make the heading and directions in plain English, so we would not limit who participated. We gave them simple instructions; Tell Us What you Think! Place a sticker on your favorite spot and one on a place you dislike. Thank you. We also added colored stickers to make it clear which spots were favorites and which ones were disliked. Labeling them I Like (with green and yellow stickers) or I Don’t (with red and blue stickers). We also chose to print them on colored paper, trying to make them as fun looking as possible.We decided to leave our identity anonymous for now and we are considering including our website later once we have organized our results.

Next, we decided to build a huge map of Winnipeg for our living room wall. We would like to use this as a tool to transcribe all our flyer results onto one map. This way we will be able to see if there are any patterns, clusters, or reoccuring choosen places. We looked into road maps at Portage Place, but decided we needed an even bigger one than available. So we needed to makeshift one, we turned to google maps which is what we had been using to design the flyers. We decided to divide the map into 36 sections and print each one on 81/2 by 11 paper. This resulted in a 6 by 6 feet map, that is larger then the both of us. Visitors to our apartment could also pinpoint thier chosen places right on to it. Next, was to figure out which areas we wanted to post the flyers, and how quantity we wanted to post.

So here we are back in the apartment after touring the city and making a couple of friends. I’ve been looking at the photos of abandoned lots and buildings we’ve taken of Windsor and Montreal. I can’t stop thinking there is something familiar about Winnipeg. Living in Windsor has left me with a handful of questions about industrial cites:

1. Why are these place in such bad shape after companies kick it to another location?
2. Why can’t they just build upwards instead of sprawling outwards?
3. Where can we go from here?

Maegan has just asked me “What is actually happening here?” We realized that we are looking at this through an outsider’s perspective and what is needed is some insight from people who reside within the city. Much like our first week when we asked our local friends about the area, we need to approach the project with a tourist’s perspective in order to get the right set of questions.

From here we decided to devise a plan and we made a list of different stradegies to engage the public with our questions about Winnipeg. We broke it down geographically and simply asked the public for their favorite and most disliked areas. How would we ask these questions and how would the information be returned to us?  We know for certain that we want the public to engage with a map of their city/hometown, but how are we going to do that?

- Immony

Today was the second darkroom workshop that we’ve done at Artcity. Our first workshop taught us how to develop our own rolls of film. After waiting a week for them to dry, we came back today to learn how to turn them into prints with the enlarger. The workshops themselves are an amazing experience, giving us an oportunity to be one on one with the in-house darkroom photography specialist. (Alix Reynolds) She walks us through each step from development to dodging and burning techniques. As well as providing us with handouts with all the information we’d want to know about the subject. The first step to making our prints was to do a test strip, in hopes to find the right exposure time for the photo transfer. Once we found the magic number, we picked one print to work on and enlarge it  into an 81/2 by 11. Our end result is a picture I took of Immony on a shady Winnipeg block.

It is amazing how much the city makes sure that everyone has access to equipment and a place to create work. Art is encouraged within the community here, where as in Montreal, art seems to be left to the artist. With organizations like Artcity, Freeze Frame, Artspace, Arts for All and community centers dispersed around the city, it seems like Winnipeg has all the tools it needs to be a vibrant city. After all it is dubbed the cultural capital of Canada, but why is this not the feeling we get when we walk along these streets?

- Maegan

Making Friends from Change in Plans (Winnipeg) on Vimeo.

It was a bit of a shock to find out that our apartment looks out onto a rougher area of the city. These areas don’t only look desolate but they seem to be dangerous. Each night we hear loud sirens and people from the park across from us. It just seems like the area and the people in it are in a constant state of turmoil. We’re still trying to figure things out. We’ve made some friends who are born and raised in Winnipeg. One of our first questions was: “Which areas are safe to walk around in the city?” They told us a little about what we can and can’t do and they explained some of the things we’ve seen on the streets. This city might need to handled with care?

After setting ourselves up in our new apartment, we decided to explore the city while taking photos for our darkroom photography class at Artcity. Stepping outside into the city was a much different experience then we expected. Montreal being our hometown, we thought we were pretty adept at navigating a city space. We’re not really sure where to begin at this point, or how we feel about this city but more on that later.

Out in the City from Change in Plans (Winnipeg) on Vimeo.

Welcome again,

Maegan Broadhurst and Immony Men have collaborated and developed several different multimedia productions and installations in Montreal. The main focus in their artistic practice is to setup social/creative structures to collect malleable data and assemble a database to understand their current surroundings.

Our portable working studio for digital photo,video, and sound. I'm stocking up on printers and folders.

Let’s give a quick run down on what we did today. Maegan and I have just moved into our apartment and began setting up our portable studio/home office. I ran over to Staples by Portage Place and picked up some cue cards, photo paper, double sided tape, and an office printer. After setting up our work area we printed some photos and mounted them to the wall. The selected photographs are of previous works together from January-May 2010 in Windsor and Montreal.

This is our research wall where we'll post photos and ideas, so we can create sketches and trace patterns

After setting up our apartment we headed to Art City for a black and white photography workshop. “Art City is a non-profit community art centre located in Winnipeg’s West Broadway neighbourhood.” We met some nice people who shared their “snacks” with us while waited for the demo. (pasta and garlic bread seems to be more like supper to me).

Maegan is sanding the house planter while we waited to schedule our wet photography workshop at Art City.

In the meantime we had some fun building a plant house for their “Planet of the Plant People Parade!” We then made an appointment for an individual workshop with Alix Reynolds, she runs the workshops and was more than happy to give us a hand with learning about black and white photograph development.

We’ll have some video updates in the next post after we stroll around the city a bit.

- Immony