Bicalogues will be an installation based video-art project that attempts to reproduce for viewer-participants the experience of having a conversation while on a bicycle ride. In doing so the project addresses a number of questions regarding the role of bicycles in social and ecological movements, as well as to postulate a radically subjective relationship between the body-in-motion, critical thought and the lived environment. Finally, by constructing a unique format for the recording and playback of bicycle-borne conversations, the project aims to develop a new genre in the hopes that many more people might record and share their experiences of riding bicycles.
Bicalogues involves two main phases, which will develop somewhat concurrently. The first of these involves organizing and filming a series of interviews that take place while on bicycle rides. These interviews will be with people with different specializations and relationships to the bicycle and made in a variety of locations. Potential interviews include conversations about:
the social history of the San Lorenzo River with local historian Blaize Wilkinson
anarchist labor history of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with activist/historian Erok Boerer
the role of the bicycle amongst humanitarian activists along the US/Mexican border with USC geographer and No More Deaths activist Andrew Burridge
and the global history of the bicyle figured in the context of Malthussian tendencies of capitalists and environmentalists alike with UCSC lecturer Iain Boal.
The second phase of Bicalogues will be the installation, in which viewer-participants control the speed at which the interviews play back by pedaling faster or slower on stationary bikes. The planned effect is that the participant finds (s)he must match the speed of the riders in the dialogue video and that of the other viewer-participant in order for the video to be intelligible. This mimics the experience matching the pace of one's riding partners while on a regular bicycle ride (itself a kind of dialogue; an attempt to find common ground while hurling through space!).
Technologically, there is nothing particularly groundbreaking about Bicalogues. All of the equipment used for recording the interviews (“dialogues”) is off-the-shelf with slight modifications. Similarly, much of the electronics and programming needed for playback during the installation is borrowed from www.opensprints.org. Open Sprints? is a system of open source hardware, software and instructions for building and running Gold Sprints?, a style of racing stationary bikes. In Bicalogues, like in Gold Sprints?, the speed at which the viewer-participant pedals will control a video display (in the case of Gold Sprints?, usually a little video game, in the case of Bicalogues, video of the dialogues).
Unlike Gold Sprints?, Bicalogues is not a race; the point, rather, is to keep pace with the interview subjects (most of whom, though avid cyclists, are far from competive athelets) so that the viewer can understand, and participate in, the dialogue at hand.
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