Subversive Gadgets

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Public Broadcast Cart: Artist Ricardo Miranda Zu?iga has turned an ordinary shopping cart into a miniature media outlet. Now, when a crowd gathers on a street corner, the class rabble rouser can have his or her voice amplified by six small speakers mounted on the cart, streamed onto the Internet via a wireless modem, and broadcast over the (still) public airwaves courtesy of a small FM transmitter. http://www.ambriente.com/wifi/index.html

GraffitiWriter Robot: Blending the technology behind remote-controlled toys with the textual immediacy of a dot-matrix printer, this toy truck, much like Joshua Kinberg's Bikes Against Bush, has five spray cans mounted on the back. The difference between the two? When the cops start chasing the truck, the operator has time to find higher ground. http://www.appliedautonomy.com/gw.html

TXTmob: Before your thumbs cramp from trying to text-message 100 of your closest friends about what street you'll be blocking off next weekend, consider this free service from the Institute of Applied Autonomy, a research organization 'dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination.' TXTmob, functioning as a sort of e-mail billboard, allows groups of people to send and receive up-to-the-minute transmissions from groups of people organized around a range of different topics. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, groups such as TimesUp! New York and the City College Radicals used this technology to keep networks of protesters informed about media and law-enforcement hot spots. http://www.appliedautonomy.com/txtmob.html

Feral Robotic Dog: The Bureau of Inverse Technology is an international design agency that develops 'technoproducts' for 'social application.' To bring attention to environmental pollution, its engineers have retooled those canine robots you see in toy stores to be 'functional gamma source detector agents.' In nongeekspeak, that simply means they're cyberhounds that buzz about in packs, sniffing for radiation. The group hopes that people will be more receptive to these cute novelties than they would be to a bunch of beleaguered activists. http://www.bureauit.org/feral/

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