2004-05-08

wi-fi bike

Yury Gitman, a self-described "wireless and emerging-media artist" in New York, has outfitted his bicycle with an iBook laptop and Wi-Fi antennas so that everywhere he goes, a cloud of free, high-speed wireless Internet access follows him.

"I'm interested in exploring the Internet physically, in motion," said Gitman, who calls his vehicle the Magicbike. [1] "It's not on our radar screen, even though we're obsessed with mobility and wireless. But in the future, we're going to do that a lot."

The earliest example Gitman cited was known as the Behemoth, [3]. [4] or the Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy. More recently, networked (and pedaled) "tricycle taxis" in Denmark have organized under the Copenhagen Connected Cycle [5] banner.

[1] http://www.magicbike.net/

[2] http://www.itp.nyu.edu/

[3] http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/roberts_09062000/

[4] http://microship.com/resources/winnebiko-behemoth.html

[5] http://wire.less.dk/?en.9.3