Technology, powered by passion, makes the resistance so cool - Cycling Mob: Road Cycling, Mountain Biking and More

08-30-2004, 09:32 AM

We should have more out-of-the-box thinking like this. Read on,
gentle reader ...

"Here's how Josh's project, Bikes Against Bush, is working at the
protests: Internet users worldwide are sending messages to the
souped-up bike through Josh's website, Bikes Against Bush. A cell
phone tied to the bike's handlebars receives the incoming text
messages, and the bike automatically sprays the messages on the street
behind it in big chalk letters. The effect is stunning: The bike looks
like it's writing the messages magically. It lasts longer than a
picket sign—the chalk takes about five days to rub off—and it's
faster, flashier, smarter, and sexier. Using a webcam, the bike takes
snapshots of the messages it writes and then automatically blogs about
them on the website, so that users around the world can follow the
bike's progress as it roams the streets of Manhattan."

Go to the Village Voice Guide to the RNC:
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Technology, powered by passion, makes the resistance so cool
Yury and his MagicBike
by Geeta Dayal
August 29th, 2004 4:46 PM

Thanks to this week's protests of the Republican convention, the
streets of Manhattan have become an outdoor gallery for the latest
trends in the fusion of art and digital technology.

A loose network of tech-savvy activists has been working for months—in
some cases years—to construct intriguingly bizarre electronic
contraptions for creative resistance. This new breed of wireless
activists is moving the Internet's power off the screen and into the
streets.

"Why should I be inside, staring at a monitor?" says Yury Gitman, a
28-year-old Brooklynite and inventor of the MagicBike, a bicycle
that's been hacked to double as a free wireless Internet hot spot.
Yury, a quiet, soft-spoken sort of guy who cites Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein and the scientist Nikolai Tesla as his heroes—
"because they were working with the emerging media of their
times"—envisions himself as the ice cream man of the wireless age.

Using MagicBike, Yury sent what he believes to be the first documented
e-mail in the New York subway. He addressed it to Mayor Bloomberg, and
sent it from deep in the recesses of the Union Square subway station.
"He never wrote me back," says Yury with a laugh. But the e-mail was
sent, and a point was made—his bike could enable things that were not
possible before. MagicBike is the secret weapon behind much of the
Internet-enabled activist art happening at the RNC protests.

For instance, Yury's MagicBike is helping 25-year-old activist Josh
Kinberg's quirky bicycle-powered chalk-printer to blog about the RNC
protests. (Yes, even bicycles have blogs now. Welcome to the future.)

"I made a New Year's resolution that I would do everything in my
ability as an artist to stop Bush from being re-elected," says Josh,
explaining why he dedicated the last full year of his life to building
the world's first wireless bicycle that receives and broadcasts
anti-Bush text messages.

Here's how Josh's project, Bikes Against Bush, is working at the
protests: Internet users worldwide are sending messages to the
souped-up bike through Josh's website, Bikes Against Bush. A cell
phone tied to the bike's handlebars receives the incoming text
messages, and the bike automatically sprays the messages on the street
behind it in big chalk letters. The effect is stunning: The bike looks
like it's writing the messages magically. It lasts longer than a
picket sign—the chalk takes about five days to rub off—and it's
faster, flashier, smarter, and sexier. Using a webcam, the bike takes
snapshots of the messages it writes and then automatically blogs about
them on the website, so that users around the world can follow the
bike's progress as it roams the streets of Manhattan.

Yury's MagicBike is also furnishing Internet access to Operation Urban
Terrain, or OUT, a citywide video installation that also happens to be
a networked live-action video game. The project is the brainchild of
Anne-Marie Schleiner and other creators of the popular game
Velvet-Strike. Featured at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Velvet-Strike
was a version of the popular shoot-'em-up Counterstrike, hacked to
have an anti-war message. OUT trades on similar themes, but it goes
one step further, connecting an online team of five players around the
world to the game happening in Manhattan. The result is projected onto
walls of various buildings throughout the city.

Throughout the RNC demonstrations, protesters are blogging, sending
photos, and text messaging each other. The Screensavers, a group of
video DJs and like-minded artists, are remixing all this raw data,
creating video performances from random images, sounds, and text
culled from RSS feeds of the day's blogging activity. And a
contraption called CoDeck, installed until September 3 in Avenue A's
alt.coffee café, will function as a platform for people to share and
discuss video footage of the protests.

Other wireless activists, worried about the inaccurate crowd counts
that so often accompany media and police reports at big protests, have
engineered an answer: the "Bureau of Inverse Technology." They're
tying wireless video cameras to helium balloons, and setting them
afloat above the crowds. A guy on skates blazes through the crowd with
the balloon, while the camera bounces data to laptops, to create a
composite photo— and count—of the crowd.

If you're looking for an easy way to join in the techie shenanigans,
look no further than MoPort.Taking the popular trend of cell phone
blogging, or "moblogging," one step further, MoPort allows the masses
to contribute real-time pictures of the RNC protests. The goal is to
join the disparate streams into a collective reporting effort. It's an
ambitious idea, even you can't always tell the good guys from bad ones
in the photos.