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The Occupy Batmobile is a Projector-Armed Protest Van

I've always been fascinated by Occupy Wall Street's "Bat Signal," a projected "99%" blasted onto buildings as a rallying cry that first appeared in mid-November 2011. It reminded me of Graffiti Research Lab's "Laser Tag project":http://www...

I’ve long been fascinated by Occupy Wall Street’s “Bat Signal,” a projected “99%” blasted onto buildings as a rallying cry that first appeared in mid-November 2011. It reminded me of Graffiti Research Lab’s Laser Tag project, in which GRL hacked up a projector system that used a computer to trace a laser pointer on a building, basically allowing writers to “tag” a whole building with light. The Occupy Bat Signal was a similar deployment of portable projector technology with a wonderfully simple, meme-ish political bent.

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It’s since gotten even wilder. Mark Read, one of the guys behind the Bat Signal, has since unveiled the Illuminator, a van with a roof-mounted projector array that’s a combination library and movie house. It was built by the zombie-proofing Brooklyn maker Chris Hackett and the crew at Madagascar Institute, whom Motherboard profiled in a 2010 video (see below).

Art Info had a great chat with Read on the impetus behind and significance of the Occupy Batmobile:

Were there any similar public artworks or activist art projects that you looked at while you were developing the Illuminator? Historically there are lots of precedents. There’s Dziga Vertov, there’s Agit-Train, if you want to go back to the birth of cinema and the use of the moving image in a political context or a movement’s context. There’s a whole group that was called “Mobile Cinema,” that was in the ‘60s. I’m aware of that work, but also there are just people who I know, like the BioTour, which a friend of mine who was a DJ and activist put together. He was going on tour with a biodiesel bus and he had a sound system and projectors, and he was going around educating people about sustainability and biodesiel. So I’m aware of both activist projects as well as the fine-art context, and also the political dimensions. There is a history to this. We’re not the first ones to do something like this; I think we may be the first to incorporate the bookmobile component. It just seemed like a really good idea. The bat signal itself has a kind of resonance to it that people will recognize right away. It acts as a kind of ambassador for the movement and allows us to get into conversations with people who may have heard about the movement or have only received distorted information about the movement.

Click through for the straight dope from Read on the makings of his meme-blasting revolution van. It’s such a good idea that you might just want to make your own. You’re in luck: right now on eBay there are a wealth of cheap projectors and cheap cargo vans waiting to power your own protest.

A Motherboard profile of the Batmobile’s builders, the Madagascar Institute:

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