Silicon Valley tech pioneers prepare for wild ride

Kevin Kelly says,

Hewlett and Packard need a ride. William Schockley and other Silicon Valley founders need a ride too. Plywood cutouts of them are hitchhiking across the country. Thirty years ago artist Jim Pallas made a plywood hitchhiker and sent it to his gallery by putting it on the side of the road with instructions taped to its back. Through the generosity of random good Samaritans who felt compelled to stop and load the artwork into their trunks the plywood hitchhiker made it all the way across the US in time for the gallery's opening.

Now Pallas has made a new set of hitchhikers, all based on the founders of Silicon Valley, but this time they contain an embedded GPS unit. You can follow their course on Google maps as they hitchhike to the ZeroOne electronic arts festival in San Jose this month.

This afternoon I watched Williamed Shockley start his journey in front of the Any Mountain store on Saratoga Ave in San Jose. Shockley was a fanatic mountain climber, and begins his journey from this mountain gear store. He has a lot of baggage in his hitchhiking cutout portrait. Besides being the co-inventor of the transistor and semiconductor, he was also carries the baggage of being an advocate of eugenics. However his baggage for this trip is primarily virtual in painted wood. But he still needs a ride. Artist Julie Newdoll put him on the sidewalk near the bus stop at 1600 Saratoga Ave, in front the parking lot at Any Mountain outdoor store. When we left him at 2 pm Sunday August 6, he was still there with his thumb out.

You can follow his progress on the Ylem site, through an elegant hack by Julie's husband Mario Wolczko. Wolczko, an engineer at Sun, hacked up a $50 disposal cell phone to act as a low-cost GPS signal generator. The phone is padded with insulation foam, hooked up to an external deep battery, and its data is sent through Accutracking and the location of the hitchhiker rendered on Google maps. It's a pure genius hack; instructions are found on the engineering page of the hitchhikers site. I can imagine many other art objects infused with this cheap GPS node, creating a network of mobile geo-caches.

In the meantime, you can track the progress of other plywood hitchhikers as they meander across the US by selecting their names on the site. Robert Noyce is staring out on a pig farm in Michigan, Fred Terman begins at MIT. Who knows if they'll arrive in time? If you are in their neighborhood and headed west, give 'em a ride. But not all the way. Jim Pallas very creatively provides motivation for maximizing the number of rides and adventures a hitchhiker should get. As the gurus say, the journey is the destination.