"...triumph over adversity, enthusiasm over apathy..."

The following is an article published in Boneshaker Magazine #3.  It's a wonderful and uplifting story on how the Magnificent Revolution started and survives.


In a marquee nestled in the festival’s midst, a clutch of wide-eyed young things are pedalling furiously on stationary bikes and staring intently at a darkened cinema screen.  Suddenly, the projector flickers into life, dust whirling in its beam. A cheer goes up: Magnificent Revolution’s first project is a success. The story of this collective of hard pedalling renewable energy champions is one of triumph over adversity, enthusiasm over apathy. It’s pipe dream meets Heath Robinson meets the future.
So the story goes, their first foray into bikes as energy generators came when a bunch of kids from Cambridge had the idea of a Drive-In Cinema, but with bicycles instead of cars – hundreds of legs whirring to produce the power for the performance. The problem was, they didn’t really know if such a thing was even possible, so they pulled together a motley array of engineers, electricians, designers, filmmakers and artists and began to experiment, initially using electric scooter motors with roller-skate wheels pushed on to the shaft, the whole unlikely contraption bolted to a homemade stand. The technology was limited, but after some trial and error, a workable ten-bike system emerged and the Magnificent Revolution Cycling Cinema was born.
Three years on, Magnificent Revolution have helped to educate thousands of people about energy consumption and sustainable technology, held hundreds of generator-building workshops and provided a renewable energy supply at over sixty music, film and art events. And they’re still expanding.
Boneshaker caught up with Director Adam Walker, a twinkly-eyed enthusiast with a friendly beard and an unruly crest of blond hair. “The volunteers call me ‘General’,” he laughs, “but maybe that’s because I make them all read an excerpt from this book by Che Guevara about the morals and discipline of the revolutionary fighter.” A joke it maybe, but the revolutionary passion beneath is very real. Adam grew up in rural Shropshire, riding his dad’s old racing bike. “We were deep in the country and the tracks weren’t made for racers, but the fact that we lived over a mile from the local shop was a good incentive to get on a bicycle.  We’d head out around the countryside, up to The Devil’s Chair (a big pile of rocks on a hill nearby) - but mainly it was a way to get out of the house and away from our ’rents.”
After studying Fine Art at Uni in Newcastle, he worked on arts journal a-n Magazine, had some exhibitions at the Baltic, started a creative collective called Normal Life ‘and spent a lot of time scooting around the Tyne on a BMX’.
But it was only when he got to London that he really got into bikes. “It was just the best way to get around the city. Your psychogeography totally changes when you cycle around London. You start joining up all those dots on the Tube map, and the place seems a little more tangible.’
His growing love of bikes dovetailed with meeting the Magnificent Revolution gang. It was through the Common Room Productions project that Adam first met two other
artists, Shaun and Babs. Common Room Productions employed artists to help engage and give hope to vulnerable people experiencing mental illness, learning disabilities or long term illnesses like AIDS and HIV. Adam, Shaun and Babs hit it off, and six months later Babs and Shaun started Magnificent Revolution – “and I just got sucked into it” says Adam. “I helped with their website, then started organising events, and soon I was totally hooked. It was a chance to use art for a purpose, as an educational tool, as well as just looking at its potential to communicate with people.  I remember the time when we first did the Wood Festival (Truck Records’ renewable energy-powered folk festival near
Oxford), and talking with the Mag Rev guys about what they were into politically, socially, environmentally... their manifesto was just perfect. I’ve always worked collaboratively, so finding likeminded people who were so passionate, it all seemed to fall into place for me.”
Magnificent Revolution offers huge potential for cross-pollination of interests and ideas. It brings together art, bikes, cinema, sustainability, education, the potential for mobility, for exploring the DIY aesthetic. “It pulls so much together, just making and sharing these pedal powered appliances. Like the lawnmower chopper – it’s sculptural, educational; it touches on engineering, design, form and function... Magnificent Revolution’s so adaptable and it keeps evolving in so many ways. That’s what makes it exciting.”
That evolution is impressive – from that first scratchbuilt cinema, the Magnificent Revolution empire now covers sound systems, recording sessions with bands, educational workshops, an online ideas-swapping hub…  “The project keeps on growing. I just finished working on a new generator that can power a 12v LED projector and sound system off just two bikes - we’re going to take it out and try it over the weekend. We keep popping up with our cycle cinema screenings across London and beyond. We’ve also started a project called the Pedal Sessions, where we’re doing some recordings with bands at festivals, and taking local bands to do some pedal-powered recordings in unusual spaces like empty offices, car parks and rooftops. Music’s always been a big thing for all of us, so working with bands
and DJs seemed a natural progression.”
But at the heart of all the Revolution’s fun stuff is education. They run a programme of workshops to introduce people to renewable technology and give them a hands-on opportunity to try stripping wires and putting together bicycle generators for themselves. “A lot of the components are the same as the ones you’d use for setting up a solar or wind-power system so, for some, it’s the first step in familiarising themselves with renewables. People bring so many ideas to the workshops, it’s amazing. I hope that, in our own little way, we’ve helped some of them to turn their bicycle power dreams into a reality.”
Over the last couple of years, Magnificent Revolution have been bringing their bicycle generators into schools, too. “We set up the kit and then run an experiment to see what the kids can and can’t power. It’s amazing to see three of them struggle to power a single 60W light bulb, and then just one of them power three energy-saving light bulbs without breaking a sweat. We did a series of pop-up cinemas
in Birkenhead earlier in the year. Huge areas of the city centre have been torn down and earmarked for redevelopment but when the economy went belly up, there was no investment available so the area has been decimated by a lack of community spaces and social hubs. We took over some of these spaces and screened some local artists’ films. All the kids and their parents from the local area came out to see what was going on and it felt like we had quite an impact there, despite the fact that the kids tried to nick our bikes at the end of every gig!”
Here’s where Adam’s enthusiasm really shines - the realisation of Magnificent Revolution’s potential to change people’s understanding. It’s not about suggesting that bike power might be a solution to mass energy-provision, but about connecting people with the power they use, encouraging them to take the need to reduce consumption seriously. “Telling people that they are using 1800 watts has a very limited value, because it is difficult to know what that means. How can we expect to change something we can’t comprehend? But the bike generators demonstrate without words, and people can relate it to their daily life. Wake up and jump into a nice hot shower (around 30 bikes), then a hot cup of coffee (60 people pedalling outside the kitchen), whack on the toaster and you’d need around a total of 110 cyclists just to get through breakfast. The workshops bring all that to life. That’s why they’re so satisfying to do. People really love it; they walk away with a total change in perspective.”
To build a community around that perspective change, Bike Lab has been set up, as an online space for Magnificent Revolution’s thousands of former pupils to keep in contact, share ideas, ask questions and keep each other posted on what they’re up to. “You see bicycle power all over the place these days and it’s good to see so many people engaging with the technology and doing amazing things with it. The site’s evolved to include people from all over the world, working not just with bicycle power, but with tall bikes, scrap bikes, weird bikes, bamboo bikes, the lot.”
From a tiny grassroots project, Magnificent Revolution has flourished into a robust not-for-profit business. “So many people have shared our vision and helped us along the way, and now we’re very close to being financially sustainable – something that’s all too rare for environmental and social projects.” Though Adam and Babs now draw a minimal monthly wage, the project remains not for profit, so all the rest of the revenue goes into kit, office space, “the daily grind of keeping it all going.”
Of course it’s not all plain-sailing – “when you’re swimming against the current you have to work harder to get anywhere” says Adam. “Projects like ours are always full of set-backs. We’re trying to drive environmental and social change in a world that is not really set up for that. Sometimes it feels like we’re banging our heads against a brick wall, but we’re starting to see through the cracks. The
rewards outweigh the hard times and so we’re still here.
Hopefully when all kids are cycling to school, learning from books made of recycled paper and eating local food cooked from scratch... they will look back at us and be proud that our generation had our heads on straight.”  His optimism is inspiring – despite the almost daily run-ins with the ‘we’re all doomed anyway, so why bother?’ brigade. “That’s just part of the challenge of working in the environmental sector. No one really knows all the answers.  We’re all just guessing. The Magnificent Revolution motto comes from the Zapatistas “We’d rather die on our feet than live on our knees”. It’s about principles. We try and demystify some of this doom and gloom and show that this could actually be one of the greatest opportunities in the history of mankind for us to show just how big our brains
are and put evolution to the test. We can either end up like bacteria on a Petri dish or as an intelligent civilization on planet Earth. We still have hope. Isn’t that positive?” There’s a popular misconception that reducing energy demand means living miserably austere, puritanical lives, but seeing the smiles at a Magnificent Revolution soundsystem party, or the excitement of an ad hoc outdoor film screening, you soon realise that there’s fun to be had too. And as Adam points out, it’s not like plasma screens
and giant fridges ever made anyone genuinely happy. “The technology we need to live in a low carbon way en masse already exists. What we need is backing: by the people, politicians and businesses. We’ve all got some work to do to make it happen, but it is possible!”
The Mag Rev team practice what they preach - using bike trailers to travel whenever it’s possible, running a biodiesel van when it’s not. When they did gigs in Greece, they went by train. An invitation to set up an MR in Australia presented a quandary. “Our environmental policy is vigorous and prohibits flying unless absolutely necessary. We’re looking into ways to travel overland – possibly
heading out across Siberia by train, but it looks like it’ll be prohibitively expensive. So we need to weigh up our CO2 emissions from flying there against the beneficial environmental impact the project could potentially have.  It’s a tough call.”
The principle of energy awareness isn’t that distant for most of us – it’s only in the last generation or two we’ve become such a wasteful society. Our grandparents knew how to be frugal – they didn’t take unlimited heat and light for granted. Magnificent Revolution brings something of that pleasing thriftiness back to the fore.
“Because we always start by finding the most efficient appliance to do a job and then work back, I soon found myself thinking how does a TV work? How does a projector work? Can it be built better, with energy use as a priority? The problem of course is that the workings are all hidden in a shiny box, so no-one thinks about it.
But I look at everything differently now. When I pass a skip I look for computer fans and electrical components– stuff I now know I can recycle. Our original kit was old reclaimed motors from junk shops, found roller skate wheels; the stands were from scrap metal. Not everyone has sufficient time or serendipity on their side to source parts from skips, so Adam and his team have been working on getting the bicycle generator design stable enough to sell on to interested parties. It’s taken a few years
of fine adjustment. “We still want to promote the DIY ethic, so we can provide people with the kit to build it themselves but we also wanted to offer something ready made that groups could use in their campaigns, projects and communities.” So you can now bag a bike generator for yourself and start experimenting - even start your own cycle cinema. How much you spend depends on how big you want to go, of course. MR’s big bicycle cinema system cost around £3000 to put together. But you could build a bicycle generator with a scooter motor, roller-skate wheel, stand, capacitor and regulator for about £100. Then pick up a 12 volt sound system and LED projector or make them yourself, maybe another £100. You can find parts almost anywhere, skips, junk shops, Freecycle. “Be resourceful”, says Adam, “get some friends to help you. And give us a shout if you get stuck!”
Working with others is central to the Mag Rev dream – the coming months will see them hooking up
with the Spoke n’ Chain collective for a special screening at The Cube Cinema, Bristol, and they’ve recently united with online community hub Buzzbank to try and fund a new Cycle-In Cinema to tour around London in 2011 – cyclists roll up on their bikes, hook them up to the generator and then power the performance for themselves. As all revolutions must, they’ve come full circle – back to the original Drive-In Cinema idea. A group of wide-eyed young things, pedalling furiously and staring intently at a cinema screen. And then the projector flickers into life, and a cheer goes up...