This Is Not Art: Bike Fixing

So the hostel I’m staying at for TINA is a 10 – 15 minute walk from the fesival hub. A bike would be a fantastic solution to this problem. The good news: TINA has a bike library. The bad news: I didn’t preregister a bike weeks ago, so I don’t get one.

However, there are piles of discarded, unloved and very broken bikes that the organisers have collected. If you can repair one to a ride-worthy state, you can borrow it. I tried to do this today under the tutelage of a bike-hippy-mechanic guy named Daniel, and didn’t get very far before I had to go off to the introductury electronic music workshop. It looked pretty rideable to me, but Daniel wanted to take the whole thing apart and make it fantastic (and safe).

I’m going to go back and do some more work tomorrow and hopefully get a bike out of it. There were lots of other people doing the same thing. The whole point of it, as Daniel and the others kept pointing out, is that we throw out bikes that could really easily be fixed, and that can still have a lot of value derived from them.

I’m really shit at working with my hands, but most of the operations are pretty simple if you have someone telling and showing you what to do. I find the experience really wholesome, and I can step back and look at something and think “Hey, I just made that, kind of, except it was actually made in a factory and then broken and then I put it back together but not really because Dan did most of the work.” Fantastic stuff.

Cipher Cities

I’m in Newcastle for This Is Not Art, a festival which is a the merging of Electrofringe, National Young Writer’s Festival, Sound Summit and some other things. It’s the first day, and after going for a swim on their awesome beach, I’m sitting in a room with some developers from Queensland.

They’re showing off Cipher Cities, which is a tool to create location-based mobile games. Basically, you join a game someone’s made, get hints and go around the city trying to answers questions that you receive either by SMS or through your mobile’s web browser.

It’s simple to make games, but extremely flexible and it can be as complex as you want.

There’s a design competition for it, so if I get time I’m going to try to put something together.

More after I’ve given the game a go.

Next up: introduction to electronic music making.