Artist Matt Hope calls the concept bicycle he’s inventing “a weird provocative object” with a “Chinese fighter pilot breathing thingy.” We call it a bike that, as the rider pedals, powers a purifier that feeds the rider more breathable air.
Hope lives in Beijing, a city where the air is far from clean, and he saw a lot of people wearing masks and biking, which struck him as kind of a bummer, because when you wear a mask you can’t breathe very well. So he set about making this rather crazy-looking but also useful bike. It is made out of a lot of tubes and a fan and a home air filter. In this video, Hope, who has a sort of soothing British accent, describes how he put it together.
One design problem: The thing uses 5,000 volts of electricity. “If you ride it in the rain, you could potentially kill yourself,” he says. He adds that “in theory” it works. Hm. I might try it. In the desert. In August.
