Many of our readers will be familiar with the written and photographic work of Gayla Trail. She has been contributing her outstanding camera work to Spacing since the magazine’s early days, while also writing and managing the You Grow Girl book and web site.
But Gayla’s most recent activity is a little different: the photo-sharing web site Flickr has given her a camera that attaches to the back of her bike — powered by solar panels — which takes random photos once a minute. The photos are then uploaded to Flickr and geo-tagged. There are 19 other photographers around North America who are also taking part.
While the photos can be a little underwhelming — though there are a few gems — it’s a great little experiment in cycling psychogeography. The project also reminded me of the man who conducted a similar photographic experiment last year, with the only difference being a camera was attached to the collar of his wandering cat.
photo by Gayla Trail and BIKE!
4 comments
On a similar note, I was at a Hallowe’en party last year in Vancouver and met a guy who had a digital camera duct taped to his hard hat. his camera was programmed to take photos once every 20 seconds or so and he carried a flash that corresponded to the camera timing. He was also with a guy dressed as the video game “Pong” – meaning he was all in black, was carrying two lit white rectangles and a lit up ping pong ball attached to his hat which he moved back and forth between the rectangles. Best costume ever!
Yikes, that “Purple Pedals” page has so much Flash junk I couldn’t navigate it and closed it. Maybe it could feed out to something less — crazy-flashy.
Hey Shawn, You can also just follow the bikes via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/purplepedals/pool/ The mapping works there too.
Just to give credit where credit is due: that there white elephant was the work of Matt Donovan, an upcoming Toronto artist. Besides the white elephant, you may see around town other works like his black sheep, his red herring, and so on.
His new project:
http://www.historymachines.com/