Mess & Noise Bike Fest – curate a night of bands for the upcoming Bikefest #Melbourne #festivals

Mess & Noise:
http://www.messandnoise.com/news/4117764

Bike Fest website:
http://www.melbournebikefest.com.au/

See bicycle parts, frames and components transformed from their typical functionalities into works of art. The Circular Bike comprises donated bicycles from Monash University’s Uni-Cycle bike share scheme. The bikes have been deconstructed from their singular bike form and reassembled to create a single, circular structure that can be ridden and enjoyed by many.

Contrasting the traditional chandelier with the functional form of the bicycle wheel, the Bicycle Chandelier merges the mechanical with the decorative to create a suspended work of art. Created using lights, wheels and aluminium rims donated by Velocity Wheels.

Fest runs (cycles through to): 25th – 28th November, 2010

The Melbourne Bicycle Film Festival x

To promote Melbourne as a city for cyclists, The Melbourne Bicycle Film Festival are looking for films up to 1 minute long that promote road harmony between all users. The films must contain a recognisable City of Melbourne location, feature cyclists wearing helmets, using a bell and contain one of eight scenarios that represent barriers to road harmony.

First prize is $1000 and a $250 voucher from Open Channel and the use of the clip by the City of Melbourne as part of their safe cycling campaign. Short listed entries will be screened before Bicycle Film Festival sessions at the Palace Kino Cinemas 26 – 28 November.

Visit www.ambiguoushorse.com for more information.

The Kopp-Etchells Effect

The Kopp-Etchells Effect

2009 Alfred Deakin Eco-Innovation Lecture presents Shai Agassi

Electric Horizon

Founder of Better Place, Shai Agassi will share his inspired vision of freeing cars from oil, reducing harmful exhaust emissions, and ushering in a new era of sustainable transportation.  He will discuss the economic factors, industry dynamics, geopolitical pressures, and mounting environmental concerns that are combining to drive this profound change, as well as the challenges we face in realising this vision. Described by TIME Magazine as one of its Heroes of the Environment 2008, Agassi will share his
 vision inspired by a profound question posed at the World Economic Forum in 2005, ‘How do you make the world a better place by 2020?’

22 July 2009
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Location: BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9015 7501
Cost: Free – RSVP essential: climateandinnovation.com.au or 03 9015 7501

More information: State of Design

Brumby cancels CONNEX & Yarra Trams contract

CONNEX has been dumped as Melbourne’s train operator, while Yarra Trams has lost its contract to run the city’s trams.

In a major shock, both transport operators were dumped with French group Keolis to run Melbourne’s trams while Hong Kong’s MTR will run trains.

Premier John Brumby announced the decision this morning, and the companies will take over operations from December.

More from the Herald Sun.

Australian petrol price finder

This one is generated off the pages of Cars Guide. Simply choose a fuel type to find cheap prices by suburb or postcode.

Pretty nifty and seems to work offering up-to-date prices and location maps.

Try petrol price finder

How would you run a whole country without Oil?

Shai Agassi at TED2009

At TED2009, Shai Agassi, Better Place founder and CEO, shares the company’s plans and says it’s electric cars or bust if we really want to eliminate tailpipe emissions.

It sounds far out, but Shai offers some great alternatives and presents solutions.

Ted 2009 Video

Bicycle as a metaphor of change in China – exhibition

CHINETIK
Closes APRIL 19 2009
The project CHINETIK has picked nineteen Chinese street bicycles and shows them unaltered, with their original wares – coal, cooking pots, litter, etc., as sculptural works in a different cultural context. These authentic articles of daily use thus acquire the basic characteristics of objets trouvés, though with the difference that they are not integrated into an artwork but themselves become independent works of art.

Changes at a frenetic pace
When talking about China’s development from an agrarian society into a global economic power, figures usually are more expressive than words. After the long period of self-imposed isolation, more than 400 million human beings today in the Middle Kingdom communicate by cell phones – when, barely ten years ago, the majority of 1.3 billion Chinese only knew of the telephone by hearsay. 1300 new cars are registered daily in Beijing, 2 million motorised vehicles congest the streets of the capital every day, changing the cityscape and the quality of its air. Within ten years, according to conservative estimates, 130 million cars will be driving on China’s roads. There are still 540 million bicycles in China, the former nation of cyclists. At some time in the near future, cars will gain the upper hand over cyclists on roads in China. The realities of daily life in China are changing at a frenetic pace, with a loss each new day to ordinary Chinese culture

The end of bicycles?
The pace of change is too rapid to keep up with it by bicycle. Barely thirty years ago, the bicycle embodied the progress from the relative static ox driven cart toward greater mobility and, in a small measure, toward the freedom afforded by increased mobility. In the 1970s, the bicycle was a status symbol in Chinese society. In order to obtain a bicycle, one had to have a coupon, and coupons were distributed by draws. Moreover, the owner of a bicycle had the opportunity to engage in trade and commerce. Tricycles served as mobile kitchens, for the transport of coal, as repair shops, stores or for the removal of refuse. Served – since bicycles and the culture surrounding them are disappearing from the urban scene in larger Chinese cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. One does still see them, but not in great numbers, and bicycles now bear the stigma of a passing era. They are becoming symbols of change, museum objects, a retrospective on wheels.

Bicycles as works of art
The misappropriation of the bicycle causes tension and a frictional interface that becomes a metaphor and stands for change. Against the backdrop of frenetic modernisation CHINETIK is a meaningful artefact, a vehicle for change and contrast. CHINETIK creates its own object language that is not the language of the marketplace. In the western world, on the contrary, industrialised nations are intensifying their search for alternative forms of energy. For the exhibition, 14 artists (Guillaume Bijl, Daniele Buetti, Franz Burkhardt, Stephen Craig, Gao Lei, Peter Knapp, Job Koelewijn, Peter Kogler, Mu Bo Yan, Robert Rauschenberg, Ulrike Schröter, Michael Vessa, Thomas Virnich, Xiao Yu) have been commissioned to re-think “Chinese” bicycles that are exhibited alongside the original ones. Through this transformation, the bicycles are disconnected from their real function and find their way into modernity.

Illustration:
Thomas Virnich  (*1957, De), Vehicle in its flowery silk corsage, 2008 / 2009

Tinguely museum