Rider Spoke

The audience come to the Barbican either on their own bike or to borrow one. Following a short introduction you head out into the streets with a handheld computer (Nokia N800) mounted on the handlebars. You are given a question about your life and invited to look for a hiding place to record your answer. The images on screen are drawn from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry: swallows flutter across the screen to show available hiding places, prefab houses indicate places where others have hidden.

Once you find a hiding place - a spot previously undiscovered by any other player - you record your answer onto the device. Each hiding place combines two properties: the physical location and the electronic location as reported by the device and, for this reason, position itself is slippery and changeable. This is especially true as the University of Nottingham designed and built a system that uses wifi access points to determine the position of each rider.

The other aspect of the game is to find the hiding places of others. When you find one the device alerts you to stop and then shows you the question that that person answered and plays you their answer. The recordings that people make are only available in this context: played to a player, alone, in the place where they were recorded.

Contact information

Rider Spoke
Unit 5, 20 Wellington Road
Portslade
Brighton
BN41 1DN
Phone & Fax: +44 (0) 1273 413 455

Webpage:
www.blasttheory.co.uk