In a new twist on the "take a picture of something every day for a year" genre of YouTube videos, a marketing and design firm locked a bicycle onto a post in SoHo and photographed it each day for a year. Pieced together, the photos document the bike's slide into oblivion.
The project, known as Lifecycle, was set up to promote New York City's Hudson Urban Bicycles. The bike was outfitted with a basket and "I Love NY" water bottle. Surprisingly, the bicycle remained unmolested for five months, with seasons changing and other bikes coming and going. Suddenly, the water bottle disappeared. The scavenging had begun.
After six months, more parts started to vanish. After nine, the bike was gone. Between October to December, the photographer took daily shots of the post as other bikes came and went.
We'll give the human race the benefit of the doubt and suggest that six months may be the point at which a bike chained to a post enters the public domain. And as the first few parts begin to disappear, it's easy to see how the rest would soon follow. Perhaps the person who finally cut the lock from the post and removed the last bits of bike is a follower of the broken windows theory and did it out of a sense of civic pride.
Honestly, six months is a long time for a bike to gather dust on a city street. We bet the folks at Red Peak, the firm that made the video, were pleasantly surprised to see the bike still in one piece on days two and three. And while the time-lapse video is certainly neat, we'd love to see more than one photo per day, perhaps catching a handlebar thief in the act.
The video is also available as a 365-day desk calendar, so you can follow the bike's demise day by day.
Video: Red Peak
