Velo City PDX
Velo City PDX
In this riff on the Exploded Museum meme I chose to focus on Portland, Oregon's vast network of car-free roads for bike and other non motorized travel. Velo is the French word for bicycle and the juxtaposition of the English spelling of city combines to form the word velocity, and expresses my friend Joseph Theibes' observation that Portland is similar to many of the places in Europe he's visited in that bike travel is supported by the city's infrastructure. Portland has been recognized as one of the most bike friendly cities in the United States. I only started biking earlier this spring after walking/bussing for the last 10 years. I feel like a tourist in my hometown since traveling the city by bike reveals a whole new level that's undetectable unless you actually get your ass on a bike and go experience it.
This series of photos and short stories is based on the concept of the city itself, in particular the parts most accessible to bikes, as a sort of museum. History is written into the land as human and non human structures are maintained and decay at varying rates. The Springwater Corridor for example is a 20 or so mile long non-motorized road that was built on the path left by an old railroad that once connected Oak's Park in Sellwood to the city of Boring in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It zig-zags through the winding course of Johnson Creek, one of the only creeks in Portland that's not buried underground in pipes.
The concept of this museum is deeper than simply seeing the bike accessible parts of Portland as a museum. Velo City is a museum in motion that includes the stories and memories of the riders who participate as well as ephemeral documents like photos, drawings and written accounts. The direct experience of riding a bike through the city to reach these places is the interactive element that brings the latent concept of city-as-museum to life.
The traditional idea of a museum seems to me to be more or less like a tomb for art. The austere environments can't allow too much life inside the walls because life evolves, changes, decays, grows, transforms. The museum seeks to preserve ephemera of the past in an environment hermetically sealed from the changes of living things. It's an environment totally devoted to creations, constructions of humans as creatures alienated from our context and trying really hard to pretend we're not creatures at all.
The direct experience catalyzing agent of Velo City brings the participant out into the open where the weather patterns, plants, people, critters, machines of the world are unfiltered by the walls of a box. You can feel the bumps in the road through your hands, the wind hits you directly and isn't deflected by a windshield, rain, sun and traffic are all immediately present. Humanity's pathological disconnect from awareness of its symbiotic relationship with the rest of the biosphere has reached a point where we could very likely render our environment unfit to support human life. Hiding away inside museums, movie theaters, malls, restaurants and skyscrapers allows us to stay disconnected and ignore the burning planet.
Part of this museum's mission is to show how Portland has gone to great effort to make biking a viable means of transport with a wide network of bike lanes, low car traffic streets, and miles and miles of roads exclusively for non-motorized travel. Riding a bike gets you where you need to go while keeping you in shape as opposed to burning oil and feeding the fire that's burning the world so you can sit on your ass in a controlled environment where you can just turn up the car stereo to drown out the world. The environs outside your car windows are like watching life on TV. It's easier to smell the pollution when you're not sealed inside your metal and glass box. It's easier to experience how much noise pollution arises from a freeway when it's not muffled by the hum of your personal oil burning chariot.
Not everybody can ride a bike. I realize that, but there's far too many healthy people who unnecessarily hop in an oil burning hot rod just to go a mile to a store to buy some item that could have easily been carried in a backpack or a pocket. With hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil gushing out of the ocean floor every day in the Gulf of Mexico it has become unavoidably evident that the actual cost of continuing our oil driven frenzy of consumption is too high to maintain the habit when you factor in all the damage it does to our homeworld.
Velo City moves beyond the wishy washy Postmodern trance to take a firm position in favor of humans taking action to reduce their output of pollution and consumption of energy so that the future doesn't have to suck for so many people and other life forms tortured or blasted out of existence forever by our myopic obsession with monetary gain. Riding a bike instead of driving a car, truck or SUV is one very potent action that can drastically reduce your carbon output. Portland makes it much easier than most places.
Greg Wandering Yeti
Spring 2010