Blast Theory (UK): Rider spoke

Riding starts from the Festival centre where you can find the Rider Spoke front house. You don’t need anything just come and get the instructions, bike and helmet from the front house and then with a ring of the bell off you ride into the city for a highly inventive game of hide and seek.Rider Spoke is a work for cyclists. A games console mounted on the handlebars of your bike guides you as you glide through the streets of Kuopio. You explore the city by bike, looking for places to hide recorded messages and find digital treasures others have hidden. Supported by GPS technology the evening unfolds on the screen in front of you and on city that surrounds you. Digital and urban space combine to create an exciting, innovative and evocative ride into the heart of the city.

Your companion on the journey, the handlebar mounted screen, uses wi-fi hotspots to show you where other players have hidden recordings and places where you can stop and make your own recordings. The interface employs imagery 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. It’s all out there to find – let’s go hunting!

Blast Theory (UK)

Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media, creating groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting. Led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, the group’s work explores interactivity and the social and political aspects of technology. It confronts a media saturated world in which popular culture rules, using performance, installation, video, mobile and online technologies to ask questions about the ideologies present in the information that envelops us.

“Rider Spoke consists of a highly original and exciting form of augmented travel…a delicate, almost intangible work. Like other Blast Theory performances, it combines elements of trust and risk, irony and politics, confession and exposure, orientation and disorientation, everyday life and digital worlds.” – Realtime, Australia

“The show’s greatest gift is that it manages to embrace the remorseless urban rush of the City while insisting on the individual’s ability to pierce it with quiet reflection.” – Metro, London