April 16th, 2007 by Justin Oberman
Many of you know and recall the large impact that text messaging had for protesters and the police during the Republican National Convention in 2004. Well one little story that also made some news, but never really made it to use, has just returned to the headlines. It all started when Joshua Kinberg built a bike, or as the police put it “quick escape vehicle” that, rigged to a cell phone, could receive slogans via SMS / Text Message and spray them on the ground with chalk.
“A cell phone received text messages from visitors to my website,” Kinberg explained, “A program I had written sent the message to a printing apparatus.”
Apparently, the bike was part of his Parsons (art school) thesis and took six months and 5,000 dollars to build.
It was the ultimate convergence of high-tech and old-school dissent.
Unfortunately, Kinberg was arrested before he could ever put the bike to use when he demonstrated the setup in front of MSNBC camera’s. He was arrested by the bomb-squad, which apparently also cited his genius.
Anyway, his bike was confiscated for six months. The apparatus was eventually found behind a desk at the D.A’s office, sans the bike.
[via New York Magazine]
Technorati Tags: bike, chalk, nyc, politics, protest, republican, rnc, sms, text message
