Weekly objectives

Design Development

Bike Bloc Room

Technology, albeit a bit Heath-Robinson in parts, will feature more in this room than the others. Their mix of analogue and digital for ways to get their message around and their actions made needs to be on show.

Noise is their main weapon, the noises are designed to distract and disorientate the police during the demo. Just as they gain control in one area another steps in. A way to keep this change of the source in the room will be to have the noise and the visual controlled by where the visitors stand.

The room will be quiet and the screens will be blank until the visitors stand on/in light circles showing on the floor. Individual spots will control separate screens and speakers. See a spot on the floor, especially a light, and you can’t help but go and stand on it…

Will this spotlight take us back to the plain circle for the ID?

Turning the Bike Bloc flyer into the room entrance

Model of screens and viewing area

The atmospheres to aim for

These images of the Bike Bloc machines being confiscated by the Police in Copenhagen is part of the mood we’re trying to create inside the room. Show the tension of the confrontations between the protestors and the police.

Cold, stark images of the events outside compare with the warm colours of the workshops, the haven (at first) from the police.

Temperatures inside the room need to fluctuate to follow the stories onscreen.

Clip above from Accept & Proceed shows the technology to be used to allow light in the soundwall to follow the visitors.

Video Compilation

I’ve tried to recreate the intensity of sound in the room when all films are starting to play together, by overlaying the video and sound together into a single clip.

The priority of the volume on different clips has been adjusted as it pays through to avoid one clip taking over and drowning out the rest. It is meant to be noisy and confusing, so it needs to play more than one thing at a time.

Bike Bloc Sounds

Earlier I suggested that the sounds played as people walk past sensors connected to the horns and speakers but perhaps link the circles to the sound also? Step on a circle and a sound plays; noise from a loudhailer or horn or soundtrack? Or if each spotlight starts the soundtrack so it runs louder but out of sync?

Build up the sound as more people stand on the spotlights in the room.

Extract sounds from film clips and recompile?

Images from ‘The Welcome Chorus’ by Alice Lazarus.

The Welcome Chorus was a digital commission for Turner Contemporary in Margate, which brought together sound, sculpture and artificial intelligence (AI) in an interactive outdoor installation.

They’re a good representation for one of the plans for the Bike Bloc room: Loudhailers in a row which have a sensor attached, as visitors pass by or stand in front their sound goes off; air-horn, crowds, music (there’s the soundtrack ‘Soundswarm’ from the protest on Soundcloud in week 20).

Multiple screens showing different clips will represent the chaos brought by the separate actions used to stretch the security services at the Summit.

Contact with J Jordan, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Online meeting set up and sorted. We spoke about how he got into what he does and future plans for the Movement. He also gave a good first-hand account of the Bike Bloc project.

He asked about the work I’ve been doing, he enjoyed the Public Opinion project from way back in the Contemporary Practice module 🙂

JJ: Hey, hi. How you doing? All righty. Sorry for being so fucking absolutely useless but you got to me not like a lot of others, so congratulations for keeping going.

TC: That’s a weird thing though because you always think: right I’m starting to get on someone’s nerves with all the chasing.

So I was looking for ways that cycling gets used for different reasons. But I wanted to find unusual things, I suppose. Then I came across the V&A exhibition from a few years back, I remembered going and that there was one of the machines that you’d made for the Bike Bloc. But it’s mainly what it actually felt like doing it trying to recreate a feeling of it. So what do you remember of it? That these things are always massive adventures in life?

JJ: No, you’re you’re not just doing it for an hour, though, so they’re doing it for action. And you’re doing collectively. And it’s a huge experiment. No idea. Always. And it’s always feel so like crazily ambitious. And yet, when you do things collectively that’s what I learned so much from working in the actor’s world is, actually, when we do things collectively you think like ‘500 bikes?’ Which seems impossible.

That sense of working collectively is, is just incredible. Just things happen, magic happens. Kind of little miracles. The word miracle means it’s something that makes you smile. And that happens. Time and those kind of factors.

I remember, we arrived and a guy who had organised the canteen was there the whole time making incredibly delicious hot food. Because it was fucking cold, like December or November in Copenhagen.

It’s an amazing, stress and tension because you know that the cops are watching you, you know that you’re going to go out and possibly get arrested, possibly get injured by the cops. So there’s also this kind of building adrenalin tension. It’s an amazing way of building things like that project. It’s not just the bikes that are important is not just the action is important, actually. The friendships that are built doing that kind of stuff. It’s like some of the most important because that’s true political in a really cool way. And you do make incredible friendships through adventures.

TC: What got you into that sort of thing in the first place? Did you just accidentally get involved?

JJ: No, no, no, I was a performance artist. Fine Art degree, and basically got involved with the Down to Earth Movement in the 1990s a, movement across Britain, which was people in the trees and in squatted houses to stop the building of motorways. And basically, I got involved in that and realized that this was kind exactly like the performance art I was doing. But that it was actually making a difference that wasn’t just showing the world, it was actually transforming it. And from that moment on, I just threw myself into to applying creativity to activism and trying to find the space between art and activism. And that’s what you know. So that was always the thing.

The whole story around the art world and the Bike Bloc. So the contemporary art museum of Copenhagen invites us. So invite the social imagination to do a project around utopias and climate in the museum. And we propose a project and we say, well, we have this idea about the bikes that we like, because we’d spent time in Copenhagen. There’s this huge squat in Copenhagen called Christiania, and we’d spent a month there and we’d seen that there’s loads of empty bikes just abandoned. So we thought, okay, well, we use the bikes or turn them into machines of disobedience.

Then so we send the proposal to the museum. They go, Oh, absolutely fantastic, we’ll help with the project. The only thing is we can’t do welding in the museum. So we say no problem, we’ll get a shipping container outside the museum.

At the same time, we get an invite from the gallery in Bristol, who also decided to do a thing around climate. So we decided to join them to protect. And they say the same thing; You can’t weld in the museum but we’ll get a container for you. Cool.

So what we decided to make the prototypes in Bristol. So we go to Bristol, and we held open workshops in the museum designing tools of disobedience with the bikes. And using a permaculture design principle, in fact, and so about 50 people came to the workshop every day, and it was great.

Then we get a phone call eight weeks before going to Copenhagen, from the curator in Copenhagen. She goes; it’s great, we’ve got the container coming. We’re super excited to have you in the museum. I’ve rung up the police because there are rules about what is a bicycle and a bicycle can’t have four wheels or be more than two meters high. Whatever. And if you have bikes outside those designs, you need to send it to the cops, and then they’ll tell you whether you can get on the street or not. And so she says; so you know, you have to do a drawing, send the design and wait a few weeks before they can tell you if you can go on the street with a bike.

I was like, we don’t care if they’re legal now, so it doesn’t really matter to us. So this is a curator in the major Contemporary Art Museum of Copenhagen, you know, who had seen our proposal, which had the words civil disobedience, about 15 times and accepted the project. I don’t know what she imagined because really, we didn’t hide it. She says; what does that mean? You can’t do illegal things, because we’re funded by the City of Copenhagen. So we had a long conversation about the role of disobedience and how all the rights that she had from; wearing trousers, using contraception or having a weekend off, or going on strike.

So there’s a whole set of letters actually, between us, which I’ve kept, which are quite interesting. Then they pulled out so we did it in this legalised squat, it was an art and politics group called the Candy Factory. The irony is, in Bristol, there was then a large amount of Arts Council money being given to people going to do disobedience in Copenhagen with bicycles or whatever.

The curator of the museum had his own opinion, he said, Well, I’m gonna be honest, it’s interesting. The state is funding this activity. But to be honest, if the cops were in Bristol, and not 1000 kilometres away, I would have had problems with doing this.

TC: Where did the idea of modifying these bikes come from? Is it something you came up with or one of the other groups involved or did it just come out of the blue?

JJ: In fact, it was in Falmouth that I had the idea. Funny enough, because my brother lived in Bombay, and we wanted to do something around the climate summit. We knew there was this direct action during the climate somewhere where there was going to be this assembly, people coming out of the summit to meet people from the global south to have a People’s Assembly and say this is where the decision should be made, not in the summit where it’s corporate, and corporate lobbyists are at work. And the role of the the The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is always to find pleasurable forms of protest, you know, it’s always about how do we find forms of, not protest, but direct action, actually blocking things doing things, not just asking politicians to do things for us, it’s very much part of that DIY culture.

And so we thought, well, we’ll do Copenhagen because it was important. And we knew we would do something creative around that. And because we’ve seen all these abandoned bicycles, one of the principles in permaculture design is to use what is already there, right, that’s the basis of lots of ecological thinking, you know, often everything is there, so use what is there? So we’ve looked and seen that there’s abandoned bikes in Copenhagen. So we’re like, okay, let’s use abandoned bikes.

Normally someone’s disobedience is with the body, just the body and of course, there’s the Critical Mass experience with the bikes. So it was really this experiment, what other forms can we use bikes to do that act, so that it’s not just critical mass. In the end, the plan was to be hard for the police, and that works super well.

TC: Trying to get the police away from the protesters, to suddenly pop up here and there?

JJ: Yeah. That was the idea, that was the tactic that we decided on, we might as well. We normally write the idea down and start to share it with friends and the movements and stuff like that. And we were very involved in the Climate Cap movement at the time. So we held a meeting with people, 50 people down to the meeting. So we’re like, okay, clearly people are excited by that. Go for it.
And so that must have been in summer I think it was around the summer or a spring-summer we started kind of working.

TC: You said earlier from the kind of art side of things led you into the activist. How do people keep the nerve? There’s a clip where one policeman’s grabbing you, I think I’d be long gone on one of the bikes.

JJ: I think; what is the worst thing that’s ever gonna happen? Yeah, you get caught maybe. The court will say, oh, naughty. Maybe you’ll get a fine, you know, but you’re not gonna be executed? Yeah, that’s the end. You’ll get publicity? This art project was stopped by the police or whatever, that’s the press release that actually gets in the papers much better than, you know, just the art project.

Often what they tell you is bullshit…

Reflection

Visuals are coming together which is helping to develop the ideas further. New this week for Bike Bloc:

• Spotlights on the floor start the films at random when people stand on them – if a room just has spotlights people will be drawn to them to see what they are.
• The sound Wall – does it stay quiet until visitors enter, sensors increase the number of loudhailers starting up, slowly building up the noise as more come in.
• Different areas of the Sound Wall play different parts of the soundtrack, building up in layers as people move around. The red light shown in the visuals tracks the movement in the room, following the largest groups as they move around.

Bear in mind at the moment I’m assuming the technology for all this is available. Although similar outcomes from projects seen during different modules from studios such as Accept and Proceed’s Rapha project where people walking past the store trigger a reactive display to the street, and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta identity from Studio Dumbar where the music is made visual by creating typographic patterns in time with the sound.

Now as I go into Week 24.2 I’m looking to visualise Kindermoord and Morality Police. If there’s time before hand-in I’ll be working with more sound to help show what’s going on.

STILL TO FIND MORE INDUSTRY FEEDBACK!