THE GREEN MACHINE
A BRIEF ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE BICYCLE IN PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE
A slideshow
with
IAIN BOAL
Copenhagen City Museum
5:00pm Tuesday April 13th
Free and open to the public
Iain Boal will present a new illustrated history of cycling, one designed for the 21st century and its interwoven crises. Drawing upon the artifacts of cycling history currently on display in the City Museum of Copenhagen, the slideshow traces the heterogeneous origins of the bicycle, busting some Eurocentric myths along the way. It is a fresh story that celebrates the bicycle's freewheeling sociability and the part that human-powered mobility must play in the human settlements of the future, but refuses to remain blind to the bicycle's entanglement with modernity's satanic labor process on the colonial rubber frontier or its complicity with the automobilism that has paved the planet, rendered cities unconvivial, and now threatens the biosphere itself.
Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artisans, teachers and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology. The Green Machine will be published by Notting Hill Editions, London, in the fall of 2010.