Cycling Visionaries Awards - Project Details

Velonautica TV

While car & motorcycle culture is omnipresent in media, bicycle culture (non-sportive) is still underrepresented. Critical masses, bicycle film festivals, alleycats, car-free-days & bikekitchens are growing worldwide, but systematic documentation is lacking. Velonautica TV tries to fill that gap by presenting projects, events, movements, crafts and all that has a positve attitude towards cycling.

Velonautica TV is a project by Velonautica Institute (velonautica.org). Since 2011 we document developing cycling cultures mainly in Europe, but we aim at working on a global scale. Velonautica Institute collects videos, pictures, articles and all kinds of documents about bicycle culture which will be made available by an online archive. We also plan to create a library, write articles and book reviews, carry out and support scientific projects and inform about initiatives and events related to bicycle culture. By means of the Velonautica Institute, we want to inspire, encourage and empower communities by making cycling cultures visible and popular. Furthermore, we want to offer a platform for existing cycling projects to present themselves in a participatory way. Velonautica TV is a valuable tool in this manner.

Some Videos produced by Velonautica TV and friends are available on our Vimeo Channel. At the moment we are working on three projects aiming at a critical reflection of mobility, at representing the subjective views of cyclists and activists and at encouraging bicycle use in daily life.

Project 1: Velonautica TV Show available on TV and internet platforms. So far, a series of six episodes of 14 minutes long TV shows has been broadcasted on Okto, an open TV channel based in Vienna. Each episode consists of five individual clips following a predetermined structure.

- Portrait: one cyclist with her/his bicycle. The person tells about her/his experiences and individual approach to cycling, dealing also with topics of importance in cultural mainstream, such as fear of car traffic, cycling with kids, cycling and bad weather, etc.

- DIY Bicycle Repair: in the classic style of a cooking show, a professional female bike mechanic explains basics of how to maintain and repair your bicycle step by step in a simple way.

- Traffic On-site Inspection: problematic traffic hotspots are looked at with experts. Critique on excisting infrastructures is backed up with arguments and solutions presented by the IG Fahrrad (Bicycle Lobby Organisation)

- Legal Advice: a lawyer informs about current laws concerning cycling, how they are handled in practice and how to react in concrete situations.

- Project: an open category in which special local projects of cycling culture such as literature, upcycling, professional training, art, etc. are presented.

Project 2: Bicycle collectives and other collectively run projects

For this project we record interviews with activists in bicycle-communities all over the world and make them available for research through Velonautica.org. So far we have been recording interviews with activists from Velorution (Paris), Ciemmona (Rome), Cyclocamp, Bike Smut (Portland), Bike!Bike! (Vancouver), Auto.mat (Prague), Critical Mass Budapest, Suppen und Pedale (Zurich).

Project 3: Local bike-movements in Europe
Velonautica wants to help local bike-scenes and initiatives in Europe to represent themselves and their ideas by producing a video together.