FM - Bicycle media: analyses of a cooperatively moving medium
Research focus of the 2nd phase (2020 – 2023)
Former Mercator Fellow:
The associated subproject explores practices and media of cycling as well as cycling collectives. Cycling is understood as a mobile as well as media practice. The project aims to show how, within a sustainable transport shift, images and practices become techniques of cooperation: Bicycling has a specific "social aesthetic" (Born et al., McDougall) that is not exhausted in riding itself. Aesthetic practices co-form bicycle culture and mobile practices. Media practices can so shape mobility; they therefore have an important function in sustainable transport transformation.
The project explores bicycle cultures as collaborative collectives in which people, bicycles, images, social media, repair practices, and geo media interact. Analyses of bike vlogs and bike culture are used to examine how images generate embodiments and techniques of cycling.
Cycling produces specific cooperative publics. Through participant observation, participatory processes with cycling communities, image and film analysis, strategies of appropriation and production of public space by cycling collectives are explored. Individual practices, body techniques, and socio techniques are linked in the analysis of images and practices to show how media play a central role in the media-cultural shift in transportation.