I found the video below while browsing Vemeo with the search terms “newest” and “cycling”.
The next tour is Thursday, August 26th. Meet at the bottom of Trinity Bellwoods Park (on Queen, at the Gates) at 6:30 for a ‘bling your ride’ opportunity. The tour embarks at 7:00 sharp!
“ARTCRANK” —> art, crank. “A Poster Party for Bike People”
Nice! I want a print of that one.
Cyclists are, at this time, in this place, Avant-garde-ists, among other things. They’re the kind of people who like to break boundaries. They are contrarians; they like being on the outside. They’re critical thinkers, they like to deconstruct the way things are and put it back together better than before.
As such, they are all very unhappy people. But don’t be scared of them, they’re just like us once you get them drunk — get them drunk.
Here’s an great example of counter-culture-bike-art-mix from my favorite State in the Union, once again, Minnesota!
“If it’s ok to park a car in a bike lane it should be ok the park a bike in a “car” lane.”
I like the idea of taking this further with a little collective non violent direct action. But instead of blocking traffic like they do us, let’s take the high road, and idle some ‘bikes’ in the BIKE LANE on Simcoe St..
We can’t use the bike lane – so lets turn it into an art project!
The production would be a collective effort, but I’m thinking of cut-outs made of cardboard, painted in ‘happy’ colours, placed every two metres along the Taxi Stand/Bike Lane in question.
This is a media project – we’d have PASSIVE picture or video reporters there to record events what will almost certainly happen (if my read of human nature is on).
Eventually some bright Cabbie is going to figure out that they can just move the obstacle, or push it out of the way with the bumper of their cab – better yet – a police officer is tasked to clear it away.
As our art is being man handled or destroyed we do nothing to interfere – we just record the event! The media we capture will be good copy for established media and worth more to expedite change than a few parking tickets.
The time we spend creating beautiful replicas with slogans is key I think. This is an ad essentially, from cyclists point of view. The more we can make our art appear non offending and sympathetic the better. The best way I know of making sympathetic art is to have LOTS of different people making it. To this end we organize a art meet-up, cyclists and their families come to a fun painting project to make cut outs of bicycles into colourful inspiring objects.
We would be using all the tricks of advertising, in reverse: bottom-up instead of elite-down.
Some examples; a parent carrying a baby in a child seat behind, a child cycling for fun, an elderly couple on a tandem, tourists touring, waving, big smiles, wrap around sun glasses…
A slogan we could use in a press release could say, to borrow from Bikerooo,..
“If it’s OK to park a car in a bike lane – it should be OK to…
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I manage two blogs here at BikingToronto: "FreeWheel" and the "Toronto GTA Bicycle Rote Mapping Wiki". The Blog and the Wiki are two sides of a coin - the blog to discuss bicycle routes and mapping technology, and the Mapping Wiki to publish bike route maps contributors and I have discovered to help city planners, cycling advocates and road users to choose and advocate for safe and efficient cycling routes on Toronto's busy and dangerous car-centric infrastructure.
michael holloway
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