Bubble bike

As a bike user, I’m usually alarmed when biking in NY. Although we have all those bike lanes, people don’t respect it and we have to look for ourselves and others. This time I decided to call attention to myself, but, as always, in a good way. I attached a bubble machine to my bike found a way to attach my I-Phone to a battery stereo sound and put it inside my basket, so it was hidden. For the soundtrack, I choose some lullabies written by Chopin, just using Piano.

My ride was around Chelsea and Meatpacking, around 1pm:

The response was much better than I expected. The whole ride took around 20min and during this time, at least 6 people interacted with me, they were curious, directly talked and asked about it, not counting those who were smiling and commenting about it to others. Only one of them was not a very good response. This guy was in another bike and stopped next to me and said: – This can’t be fun! and when I asked why, he was answering while running away, but I imagine he said something like: it is supposed to be on the back, or something like this.

But besides him, some people were exclaiming: – Bubbles! , others were laughing and a woman asked me where did I buy that.

And for my goal, I had never had such a calmer ride. The lullabies were also relaxing, but I didn’t have to fight for a place on the lane. Before I started to ride my bike, I was doing it as another assignment, but by the end, I was doing that for fun. It also feels important to be doing something that nobody else is.

If I were going to take it further, I would like to find a machine that could make bigger and more bubbles and also provide a more effective sound, so I could be able to call even more attention to the drivers, that might be listening to their radios or with their windows closed. It would also be important to find someone that could record it for me and show other people’s reactions, instead of leaving my camera on my neck and make people who are watching it dizzy. But overall, I found it was pretty nice.