HELIOLITH

Wired News reported this morning on Joshua Kinberg’s bicycle-powered real-time sidewalk/street slogan writing machine. He has created a system to transmit SMS text messages from his internet website to his mobile phone. He will be riding around NYC during the Republican National Convention for example, and relaying approved slogans to his trailer-mounted homemade graffitti machine via bluetooth to an onboard Powerbook, and using Perl and Applescript to print the slogans in silksreen font on the streets. Here’s a low & high quality quicktime video of him in action (I’m pretty sure there’s no audio, but my sound has gremlins today). If you think all that is cool read on:

The system is capable of timing the firing according to the bike’s speed, he said. A webcam mounted on the back takes a picture of the chalked-up road and sends it, along with GPS coordinates, back to Kinberg’s website. Whoever wrote the message will then be able to e-mail a picture of his or her protest as an e-card. There will also be an interactive map of all the messages printed, Kinberg said. The project, called Bikes Against Bush, is Kinberg’s master’s thesis.

The output looks a little messier than I visualized when seeing the video, but it’s an incredible idea, and sounds like it would be soooo satisfying to pioneer. [edit: Thanks to TrendWatcher for this thumbnail-screenshot of the video (=