On Wind and Two Wheels

By D.S. Black

Photography: Lucas Shuman

Nothing beats the feeling of having the wind on your side. Scooping the air and riding with it is a dream that Brooklyn artist Jessica Findley has turned into reality with her Aeolian Ride, soaring through cities on three continents.
Each location provides the bicycles and the volunteer riders to go with them, while she brings 52 puffy white inflatable suits made from ripstop nylon. These goofy costumes – draped over the helmeted torsos of the riders perched on their bicycles – inflate with the breeze created by riding and turn into giant bunny rabbits (think bulbous ears), milky bubbles, and tear-drop shapes, blown taut like expandable cape-sails.
The first Aeolian Ride took place in the spring of 2004, from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Aeolus, god of the winds, can be a fickle patron, as Odysseus himself found out millennia ago. A bag of sea breeze can get you most of the way home – but it can also blow you way off course. In the years since, Findley has ridden it around the world, organizing rides of wind-borne whimsy in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Halifax.
The latest ride, on September 8, 2007, found Findley riding full circle, although the original direction of the first ride was reversed, beginning in Brooklyn and ending in Manhattan. It culminated at the Deitch Art Parade through Soho and then turned into a street party.

San Francisco, 2004

When Jessica Findley came to San Francisco in October 2004, I was fortunate enough to hear through the arts grapevine, and I met up with her in Dolores Park. There I squeezed into a bubble-shaped suit for a ride that wound through rush hour in the Mission District to one of the opening night venues for the Bicycle Film Festival.
A few days later a second, more leisurely ride went through Golden Gate Park and ended at the traditional biker watering hole, Zeitgeist bar, where cyclists park their wheels on the back patio.
The San Francisco visit was sponsored by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit affiliate of the Burning Man festival, which recognized the ride as being “a public happening of kinetic art… intentionally silly, intended to inspire laughter from both participants and onlookers alike.”
Certainly the people I rode past while bulging in a cometary-snowball outfit honked and howled at the beautiful incongruity of an angelic procession of bizarre and elongated pale riders.

“When you’re riding, you’re already experiencing the wind,” Findley explained in a phone conversation a few short days before this latest ride. “Trapping that experience and carrying it with you visually… you’re already feeling the wind blowing through your hair and your face and in your clothes. It’s kind of making you into a human kite.”
Bringing the Aeolian Ride to your part of the world takes months of preparation and arrangement. Findley prefers to work with local groups who can develop ride routes and finesse any permit issues that arise.
Although the first New York ride occurred without any bureaucratic dispensation, stringencies imposed there on public assemblies led to the latest ride being limited to 35 participants instead of the usual 52.
“Whoever champions the ride tends to bring different groups depending on who their contacts are. Sometimes it will be an artier group, sometimes more bike-centric – messengers or bike advocates. Most of them are just out there to have fun. The result is always the same: people have a good time, get silly, and enjoy something they don’t normally get to do.”
Future Aeolian Rides are under discussion for Vancouver, the bicycle mecca of Amsterdam, and Sibiu, Romania. More than a 1,000 people have signed up for Findley’s ride e-newsletter.

www.aeolian-ride.info

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D. S. Black is a writer living in San Francisco [more...]

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