From the Laboratory’s Bureau of Historical Precedence comes this dispatch: A colleague here in the studio, in a thread about Jeremy Wood’s GPS Drawing mentioned this ChalkBot robot that Nike has deployed to help promote, well — cancer awareness with the Lance Armstrong tie-in and itself by extension — at the Tour de France road race. When he started describing it, my mind immediately jumped to Josh Kinberg’s “Bikes Against Bush” project in which he used a bicycle-drawn rig to spray chalk on the pavement, in precisely the fashion of the ChalkBot — and Josh got tossed in the Pokey in the bargain! I wrote a note to Josh, curious if he was involved (if only to track and admire the activities of friends, etc) and he reminded me of the Institute for Applied Autonomy‘s GraffitiWriter and StreetWriter projects, which were his inspiration. (The data fragmentation in my human algorithm started clearing a bit.) An hour or two later, this press release appeared on the wonderfully dyspeptic, exceptionally over-sensitive, super grouse-y nettime from one of the IAA’s agents: read on
Continue reading Chalkbot Versus GraffitiWriter…Round One! Ready….FIGHT!