As a cyclist, I'm turned on to just about anything bike. My continuing fantasy is to have a lowrider in the garage just for going down to Blue Monday, our local coffee shop, for cappuccino on Saturday mornings.
So there's a big new media appeal for me in Josh Kinberg's bike project for his MFA at Parsons. The bike receives text messages which it then prints out in chalk spray on the sidewalk as the bike tools along. And while this is going on, the bike also blogs a GPS map and photograph of the words.
Here's a little movie of how the thing works in Quicktime or RealPlayer. You'll see at the top of this video that he's going to roll out a "Bikes Against Bush" performance when the Republican Convention comes to NYC this summer.
“'Bikes Against Bush' transforms ordinary bicycles into Internet enabled, tactical media weapons for non-violent, creative resistance to the RNC. First and foremost, 'Bikes Against Bush' is a wireless bicycle consisting of an ordinary bicycle with an embedded laptop computer, a bluetooth-enabled cell phone affixed to the handlebars, a bluetooth-enabled GPS device, and a webcam. Additionally, 'Bikes Against Bush' incorporates a homemade, robotic printing device consisting of a series of spray-chalk aerosol cans that can print chalked text messages on streets and sidewalks while the bicycle is in motion. Once an initial prototype bicycle is created, I will work with various creative resistance groups opposing the 2004 Republican National Convention to replicate the design.
During tactical resistance performances, the “Bikes Against Bush” website enables users to participate in the action and follow it in real-time. Online users can send SMS text-messages through the website to the bike's cell phone, where the cyclist can then edit the messages, and decide when and where to print them. When the cyclist chooses to print a message, the website is automatically updated, displaying the text of the printed message, a map image of the GPS location of the printed message, and a time-stamp showing when the message was printed. The website also contains basic information describing the project, an archive of all the submitted messages (even those that are not printed), and streaming webcam images from the bicycle." [Bikes Against Bush]
And here's Josh's blog if you want to keep track of the project.
magine a picture with a digital code embedded in it. Just a few wee pixels will do. You see a picture out in the world, and if you're curious, you simply take a picture of it with your cam-phone. The phone then detects the code embedded in the image and immediately pops up a web page or other information. It's like a picture with a hyperlink. More and more, pictures embed technologically the consumer and ideological values they constructed previously through image logic.
ere's a fascintating project by the Tangible Media Group at MIT.
I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, children can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment."
his summer turn your bike into a low-power radio station—or your apartment, your bedroom, your work cubicle, your car—during Radio Re-volt: One Person.00One Watt, a project by artists-in-residence Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla and the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC). Use your one-milliwatt radio station to reclaim the public airwaves and rethink voltage: who has the power to transmit and how can that power be reformed and redirected? 
Across the Twin Cities, the Walker will hold several Radio Re-volt workshops to teach people how to operate these radio transmitters so that each person can amplify his or her own voice, ideas, and interests. Each independent radio station owner will be encouraged to "creatively rethink the uses of radio, thus redirecting transmission power toward a spirit of experimentation and play." One's imagination is the only limit. These small, portable Part 15 radios, named for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) law that permits these unlicensed devices, can transmit up to a one-block radius, giving individuals the power to micro-cast while offering microprogramming to their micro-community of friends and neighbors. 
I'm definitely going to try to set up my own micro-radio station next winter as something play with in my Audio Workshop class. If you know of online help with this—I can't make the workshops noted here—please forward a link.
From their site: "Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
