Bush's political party, the Republicans, is having a big convention in
New York and thousands of people are having a ball with protests of all
sorts and the best thing is, it's mostly fun stuff. I caught a short
footage off RTM news a couple hours ago and now glued to my computer
checking out the wild happenings in NYC.

if you have the time (and on some pages, the bandwidth), browse all the
links down there and do check out MagicBike!

happy undependence!

joe

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Technology, powered by passion, makes the resistance so cool

Yury and His MagicBike
by Geeta Dayal
August 29th, 2004 4:46 PM

from: http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0435/dayal.php

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 <
http://www.magicbike.net/ >, 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 <
http://bikesagainstbush.com/ >. 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 < http://www.opensorcery.net/OUT/index.htm >, 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 < http://www.moport.org/>.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.

-------------

read more:

http://nyc.indymedia.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/politics/campaign/30protest.html?
ex=1251604800&en=c2c477520123fef9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0435/ferguson.php

http://www.iht.com/articles/536446.html

http://www.engadget.com/entry/7831616626215716/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/rnc


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