Woke up to perfect weather, that rare moment in Glasgow where it is just what you wanted, odd patches of cloud and sun and a gentle breeze. Spring has well and truly sprung. Down to Kelvingrove Park and all the white bikes are arrayed in a perfect circle round the fountain. It’s a stunning opening image, without anyone there. As we approach the set off point there are more and more cyclists turning up, with all sorts of ingenious systems to film the ride out. One woman has ten cameras strapped to the front of her bike, people have head cams and mobile phones. There will be a huge amount of footage…I’m fascinated to see how it will all cut together.

The ride out starts up Sauchiehall St and the pace is perfect, leisurely and slow and 200 odd bikes fill most of the road, so you can do that thing you never normally do in the city, have a conversation. It is incredibly relaxed. The only sound is the ringing of different bells on each bike, a tinkling backdrop. We arrive at George Square too quickly. I really wanted the pleasure of riding on mass through the city to last forever, it was tantalisingly short.

In the square, there is an old abandoned Peugot bike hanging ready to be painted white, I go for it with a vengeance and the original Provo anarchist white bikes manifesto is read out in dutch by Alexandros (brilliant gutteral voice) and the english translation by Peter McCaughey in his best Omagh accent. There is a great atmosphere and at one point as we present the white bike plan, people lift their bikes above their heads. It felt like a genuine homage to the original and I look forward to some of the original Dutch anarchists seeing footage and pictures and how they will feel to see their visionary ideas take flight again nearly half a century on.

It’s been a strong start to Glasgow International Festival and particularily the prominence given to non-gallery based contemporary practice that works with event, performative action, site-response, evocation and re-enactment. Its also been two years since we made a live work and this was a great way to start again.

We have checked protocol with the police and if someone has nicked one we can put a lock on the bike thus asking the thief to remove their security (timescale unspecified) before cracking open their lock and liberating the bike. Otherwise we could get done for wanton damage of private property!

So keep letting us know if you spot any; apparently two have been seen in Germany and one in London already… oh the life of international crime….

After a gap we will rebrand the remaining bikes and donate them to suitable charities and local beneficiaries, so contact us if you think of a deserving organisation. We have already had some informal chats about doing it again in the future (perhaps we will help people make the bikes next time) and it is testament to the strength of the original idea that it has sparked such interest.

One of the defining characteristics of working at the art school is the ongoing ebb and flow of objects (mainly crap exhumed from skips) in and out of the studio. Not so with one of the NVA white bikes which seemed to spend a couple of days up here, and which was cherished more fondly that the usual assortment of rubbish. It was however returned to the streets (i think) in the spirit in which it had been placed there.

The white bikes was an interesting project, my only reservation being that they had to be locked up, (probably a concession to a funder somewhere down the line), which meant they were largely only accesible to an art-savvy crowd (it seemed) who knew the lock number and where to get it from. Understandable though, given that the budget had to come from somewhere.

This got me thinking about protest, motorway building, and another transport project at the other end of the budget spectrum – the 5-mile extension of the m74 through the southside of the citycentre. If the £500,000,000 budget for this project were redirected, you could buy 2 million bikes for Glasgow. That’s two per every member of the population of glasgow and surrounding local authorities, or an enormous free-to-access cycle rack, stretching 1000km from end to end or solidly covering 1.5km2*. Bikes would be so ubiquitous they would loose their resale value and not be worth stealing. Some of the money could be diverted to build low-cost sheltered cycle-ways between the city centre and outer regions. The existing motorways would be relieved of some of their traffic, freeing up space for business and haulage and the general health of the population would increase. The reduced wear and tear on the roads would free-up budget for more ambitious capital projects, such as submerging the existing motorway and creating a more ‘connected’ city.

Obviously these types of ideas would instantaneously be written off as nonsensical by people in power who lack even the most basic imagination functions, and see urban mobility in the discredited motorway-building schemes of the individual-mobility modernist post-war years as an innovative solution to todays problems, but it’s nevertheless interesting to compare figures, and see exactly how many bikes 5 miles of motorway could get you.

*all estimates carried out using casio fx 6300g scientific calculator, circa 1992.

where are the bikes?  who is using them?  are they living overnight at gi festival venues?  there have been reports of people locking them up with their own padlocks, rendering them useless to a potential user, and therefore effectively stealing them out of circulation.  we are thrilled by the way the whitebike plan has fired the imagination of all festival goers, but we want them to remain in the use of the public and unleashed from personal padlocks.  a plea to all; return those bikes that have been pilfered and purloined so that we can all use, enjoy, benefit.

a few questions that have been suggested are:

would you consider painting your own bike white, and leave it around for public use?

would you sign up to a year-long scheme for bike sharing?

where are you going today on your bike (or where have you been)?

how can we make this (the white bike plan) happen?

any answers put them here.  or any new questions feel free to add them!

there are fabulous photos of the ride out and bikes in action cropping up on central station images, nva website, facebook, gifestival flickr site, twitter to name a few.  go search and find them and add yours too!

Well its been an upside down week since we launched the White Bike Plan on a sunny day last Thursday. There is a Baltic chill in the air, my family are all still stuck in Lanzarote care of Ryan Air, who make Thatcher look like the good samaritan.  Never have I abstractedly hated a company more and their ethos of treating customers as little more than ‘dirt with wallets’. If there was a god, that shower of shit and their vile little leader would have had their come-uppance long ago!

I only share this small rant as I suppose their ethos is so diametrically opposed to what the White Bike Plan stands for. Of course, we will never have major impact on the world or bring joy or misery to millions, but in a way I believe its better to be small in your impact but have a shred of idealism left…

Meanwhile I haven’t been back on a bike because my legs are not actually functioning after running Lochaber marathon at the week-end. Although I trained for up to 50 miles a week through the winter I was still physically destroyed after crossing the line in 3hours 30mins. It’s amazing how your mind must edit out the pain memories from previous races. I couldn’t believe that so many muscles can be sore for so long. Right, I need to get a grip; this is turning into a blog moan. I am walking again and went in search of a bike this morning I spotted last night, but it had gone. I even had a Dutch white bike sweatshirt on so if I had to confront someone I could just show them my logo without confrontation and ride the bike back to the hub in Miller St. But word is, the bikes are out and about and holding up well and being well used. The footage and images on Vimeo, Facebook, YouTube are stunning and a great record of the action. It really has worked as a form of democratic art representation.

I think on the final week-end of the festival we should do a massive call-out to all the good hearted people of Glasgow to track down the 50 bikes so we can get them back in one piece to re-distribute to deserving community groups and local programmes across the city.

I finally realised tweeting has a purpose as there has been ##KA##a great campaign with people tracking down and spotting bikes in unusual places. Joe at Gear who built them for us had a nice story, a wee boy from the local primary school came in to see him, his sister’s bike had been stolen, so he wondered if he could have one of the “free” bikes to give to her. On that happy note, adieu.

Angus

Photo: Alaisdair Smith

we are asking questions of people on the street who are using white bikes, so here we’re posting some of the first responses.  if you’ve used a white bike too please give us your answers, what other questions you want us to ask, let us know where you are going, where you’ve spotted other bikes both being used and parked up, if you’ve made friends with other white bike riders etc

the first set of questions (and some responses) are listed below.  if there are answers, or questions, you’d like to add please do!

-  are the roads easy to use; did you have any problems with other vehicles?

‘one way system need to be figured out, but drivers were very courteous!’  ‘busy, but ok’

-  did the bikes get any comments through the day?  what?

‘yes!  and it was really amazing to be able to chat with other whitebike users’  ‘a few looks’

-  did you end the journey / your day on the same bike that you started on?

‘still on same one! am keeping it to do Atypical Root’

-  what had you heard of the Provo movement or the White Bike Plan before?

‘nothing but read about it in NVA booklet’.  ‘yes!  and read about it ahead of coming to GI’.

-  what future do you see for the White bikes in Glasgow?

‘would be amazing…’  ‘would be good for the city’

-  is this a good spend of public funding?

‘ yes’  ‘yes, yes, yes!’

-  do you normally ride a bike?

mixture of yes, no and occasionally – so we’re capturing you all!

-  did you jump any traffic lights?

a resounding NO on all the questionnaires, hurray!

-  what other questions do you think we should ask other people?

‘where are you going?’

‘how can we make this happen?’

NVA’s Angus stood in front of the amassed cyclists, painting a bike white, whilst the manifesto was read out in Dutch and English, to a cheering crowd who lifted their bikes above their heads into the air. The site of all the bikes coming down West George Street and towards George Sq brought tears to some of the team’s eyes.

The bikes are now available for use around the city and Gi Festival. See the details of how to get on a white bike here. And if you use one, spot one, hear about one – take a photo and tweet it with the #whitebikes tag. See what’s being said about the #whitebikes already. And have a look at the footage and stills that are being uploaded.

It doesn’t stop here:

The White Bikes Film - Central Station are gathering all the footage shot at the ride out to make one big crowd-sourced film. If you have footage please upload it ASAP to the Vimeo group. The finished film will be released for everyone to use, share, pass on.

Photos – If you took photos, please share them and add them to the White Bikes Group.

How was it for you? - Over the course of GI NVA will be posting questions on your experiences of the white bikes and cycling in general, watch their blog for daily updates and the questions will be released on twitter too – The white bikes have already started a bit of debate – tell us what you think.

Spotted White Bikes: The white bikes are now free to roam the city, let’s see where they get to, help to share the white bikes journey by taking a photo or tweeting (#whitebikes)when you see one. Go on – Ride a White Bike.

Usual questions, about what if they are stolen and is this art….to the first: if you base what you do on the worst that can happen, nothing good in the world would ever happen, on the second: that a re-enactment as social action communicating ideas about real issues that were relevant to everyday life 45 years ago as they are today is an important strand of contemporary practice (they won’t use that bit).

After ten takes I said to the interviewer that I was beginning to sound like a politician, he said yes but the difference is that you mean it.

Angus

Since the weather has improved I’ve been riding an old 1940’s Dawes super galaxy racer round town. This is a bike with a strong lineage going back to before the Provo’s time. My friend Wendy’s dad Norman Shillinglaw was an amateur champion cylist with Gala CC. He emigrated to Canada in the early 1990’s and had to sell most of his bikes before he went. I was luck to get one of his Dawes touring bikes. It was stolen last year, I was completely gutted and could hardly bear to tell Wendy as her dad had recently died and there was a real sense of connection to him through the lost bike.

It turned out that he had kept one last bike in Canada and it had come home to Scotland in bits in a cardboard box and was lying in a garage in Kilbarchan. Wendy wanted me to have it, so I picked it the box and took it unopened to Joe at Gear Cycles in Glasgow and we found a 65 year old English Leatheries seat and the original frame and wheels of a single speed track racer from the same period. Norman had found it in the coal cellar at the back of his uncle’s house in a village near Durham and had done it up 40 years ago. Joe put on new forks, as the huge bend at the end of the old forks (which gave it the look of a pre-war original from the Tour de France) made it really wobbly to ride! He also put on a set of Campagnola gears and new brakes as we weren’t too purist when it came to safety.

So I feel like I’m riding a piece of living history with this bike, it’s a hybrid of different people’s attention and care from over the years, but most important is the fact that its still going. If any of the white bikes survive that long it will be testament to either good manufacture or luck!

Angus