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Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Chapter 28

Making Things and Drawing Boundaries

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Movable Party

Wendy Hsu, Steven Kemper, Josef Cameron Taylor, Linda Wei, and Jacob Alden Sargent

Movable Party is a bicycle-powered system for participatory musical performance designed and built by Los Angeles-based maker collective, Movable Parts. Taking design inspirations from Taiwan’s street sound innovations, the collective made the system to instigate ad hoc, emplaced social interactions as a form of creative friction against urban sprawl. The system consists of three stationary bicycles, each equipped with rear-wheel hub motors that generate enough energy to power a medium-sized public address system. The bicycles are also equipped with sensors to track rear-wheel speed as well as rider position. Mapped to musical parameters in software, sensor data from riders’ gestures and movements transform the bicycles into interactive musical instruments.

Figure 28.1. Movable Party. Format: Participatory musical performance. Materials: Bicycles, sensors, Arduinos, hub motors, power inverter, charge controller, battery, laptop, and PA system. Wendy Hsu, Steven Kemper, Josef Cameron Taylor, Linda Wei, and Jacob Alden Sargent. Photograph courtesy of the artists.

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