Flickr Bikes have Purple Pedals

Taking a spin on your bike with your camera is always a great way to get out and experience your neighbourhood. Whether you are a shoulder slinger, a hip shooter or you have a third eye on your helmet, documenting a ride can be quite revealing.

Yahoo has taken a different approach and let the bikes do the shooting. They gave 15 custom, purple city bikes (Electra Townie 8s) to urban cyclists around the world. The bikes are equipped with a bar-mounted, solar-powered GPS camera phone and upload images to photo-sharing site Flickr every 60 seconds while in motion.

By checking out the bike's photostream (and let's be clear - the bike takes the pics, the rider steers and points), you get a visual tour of the ride from the point of view of the bike itself - low angles and lots of randomness. You also get to see where each image was taken on the accompanying GPS-plotted map.

Eric Harvey Brown is a New Jersey-based cyclist and photographer (known as ‘dogseat' on Flickr) who is the proud poppa of one of three east coast bikes.

He got a call one day and within weeks ‘Moose' was delivered and he was mobile and transmitting.

Brown's riding style and methods have been altered as he navigates from ‘A' to ‘B' - from home in Jersey City to work and play in NYC every day.

"If ‘B' includes a night time destination necessitating the bike being parked outside, that trip might not happen - there are a lot of easy to steal bits on the bike," Brown says. "I find myself doing more lunchtime errands. I left my other bike in Jersey City and took the train in, so I usually don't have my bike at work.

Now, I have this big purple thing and have cause to use it more."

While the images generated in an afternoon trip can be a little overwhelming, it's the secondary function that calls out to Brown's subversive side. He is experimenting with writing via the GPS map and is considering taking the bike on urban race events in New York City.

"The mapping function is my favourite part. I can go out on a ride with the idea of photos in mind, but you can also go out on a ride with the mapping in mind," Brown muses. "What will my map look like? What can I say with my map?"
As the bike-cams are part of a large ad campaign, implications of cultural appropriation have been raised, but Brown shrugs it off.

"I think it's more of a literal and metaphorical ‘lens' through which to perceive a culture," he says.

It may have started in the corporate world, but the personalities involved have taken this project into new forms and from there, who knows? We'll have to wait and see what the bike artists come up with.

About the Author

David Niddrie is a photographer and writer who is regularly found on the Vancouver bike paths shooting for Momentum & other bicycle-based ventures. You can see more of his work in Adbusters, Beyond Robson, CBCr3 & Maisonneuve, He is a year-round cyclist, concert junkie, and lover of those elusive 'out there' sights & sounds. Drinking maté, hiking the North Shore, watching surrealist westerns (and Galactica of course) and constantly tinkering with his bikes are what makes him tick. That, and dreaming of a return trip to Argentina sometime soon. [more...]