Recently we wrote about Contrail. This project even goes beyond that! Some guys have invented an amazing city printer called the Chalkbot. The Chalkbot is a fully automatic robot that is able to print the streets as if it’s a piece of A4 paper slightly slipping through your inkjet printer. Besides the fact that the printer is a real friends project, Nike has adopted it and will use it during the Tour de France, when it’s normal to chalk on streets.
“100.000 messages of hope, courage and action will be printed on the roads of the Tour de France with Chalkbot. It’s a campaign for Nike who have been supporting the Lance Armstrong Foundation since 2004. If you have footage of the markings on the road feel free to share them in the comments.”
It’s a good job! The printer looks to work really well and the yellow text colour corresponds well with the shirt Lance Armstrong usually wears. The best thing though is that I’ve got something to look forward now during those long and boring live reports of the Tour de France. Chalkbot has also a Twitter account to share chalking suggestions.
—Source: Fresh Creation
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Combine the two and you have an (inspirational?) ancestor from the Bush Era:
Bikes Against Bush is an interactive protest/performance occurring simultaneously online and on the streets of NYC during the Republican National Convention. Using a wireless Internet enabled bicycle outfitted with a custom-designed printing device, the Bikes Against Bush bicycle can print text messages sent from web users directly onto the streets of Manhattan in water-soluble chalk.
http://a.parsons.edu/~jk/thesis/archives/video.html
Let’s make the whole picture, and go back to the first New-Media artwork that laid the conceptual groundwork for this ‘advertising campaign’:
Since 1998, the Institute for Applied Autonomy has been inventing and building robots to protest the militarization of robotics research and to reassert the public’s ownership of public space. Among the machines they produced were GraffitiWriter, a small remote controlled robot capable of printing high-speed text graffiti on the pavement while driving, StreetWriter, a black cargo van capable of printing large text messages the width of a traffic lane while driving, and SWX a more compact trailer version of the same.
IAA released a press statement about the Nike Chalkbot Rips-off of Streetwriter:
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/chalkbot.html
Check also Golan Levin’s (and Collaborators) post about how new-media artworks laid the conceptual groundwork for everyday commercial products while they remain unrecognized as such thus creating a ‘cultural blindspot’:
http://www.flong.com/blog/archives/334
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[...] we already introduced the Nike Chalkbot used to add supporting and commercial texts to the streets during the Tour de France. Here’s [...]
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