Richard Wilson's black cab and spinning Caravan. are sexing up the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until Jan 14 2007.

More images: BBC, Matthew Bown and Andy and Tony's flickr photos.

The magnificent Flying Steamroller (1996), by American artist Chris Burden, is in London until Sunday.

Every half hour the 12-tonne machine is spun around on a massive piston. The steamroller is driven in a huge circle until its maximum speed is reached. At the same time, the hydraulic piston is activated and pushes up the beam from which the steamroller is suspended.

The engine then lifts off the ground and continues to spin, or fly, for several minutes.

Up at The Parade Ground, Chelsea College of Art & Design, Millbank (next to Tate Britain) until 15 October 2006. Images. Also on view are 14 Magnolia Double Lamps.

On Friday 6th October the Post CS parking space in Amsterdam will be turned into a drive-in concert hall. The transmission of the gig will be reinforced by tuning your own car radio.

Each car stereo in the parking space will receive only one part of the live sound, as drums, guitar and vocals will each have their own radio frequency. Participating car owners will assume the role of musician, producer and sound technician.

Alongside participating cars, artists Sasker Scheerder and Aux Raus will be assited by several boomcars, made to deliver the most sound and deepest bass possible outdoors.

Organised by Mediamatic of course!

Talking about vehicles and music, check also Music for Public Rail, a sound piece designed by Benjamin Chaffee for downloading and listening on personal headphones while riding the MTA L line in New York.

The soundtrack is made up of ambient noises recorded from several rides on the train. The frequencies were then isolated and common themes that occured throughout the recordings at specific moments during the ride were discovered and mixed into a new ambient soundtrack.

The work creates a new interaction between the world behind the headphones and the world the rider is physically inside, proposing another way to listen. Apart from re-designing our exterior world, how can we change our experience through adjusting the way we attend to it? How can we change our environment through the way we perceive it?

Details found at fergus the squirrel. Image from Conflux's website. Thanks Phillip!

Related: LocoSound, a work in progress that aims to synchronize an FM audio experience with the landscape viewed from a train window; headphones that turn urban noise into music.

International Airport Montello (Nevada), the latest project by Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger from eteam, features fictional terminals, transit lounges, and runway that occupy a ten-acre plot, purchased on eBay for less than five hundred dollars, and an abandoned airstrip.

Working with the residents of nearby Montello (population sixty-seven), they created an "airport" that includes the entire town. A number of local restaurants and businesses revamped their interior spaces to turn the town into a place “like any other� airport: its convenience store temporarily housing a gift shop of hand-decorated IAM merchandise, its two bars, and its plateaus, outfitted with folding chairs, doubling as cheap airport lounges. The artists also organise events that would create or revitalize a culture around the airstrip, and consequently help further developments in Montello.

Explaining the ephemeral nature of the installation, Moderegger spoke of a desire "to create something emerging temporarily—that is what a town is. There is nothing here, but in a way there is everything here."

Via rhizome < art forum. Big Red & Shiny.

According to research by Sheilas' Wheels, a UK car insurance company which had previously designed a female-friendly seatbelt, 82 percent of women feel safer with someone sitting in the car beside them and nearly a half don't like driving alone in the dark.

The solution they propose is "Buddy on Demand," a blow-up man that fits in the glove box, appears at a flick of a switch and is swiftly deflated when his services are no longer requested.

"We're not saying that an inflatable man is the only answer but we do hope it will give women extra confidence and make journeys in the dark less fearful," said Jacky Brown, the spokeswoman for Sheilas' Wheels.

My tip? use it in combination with the inflatable safety belt. It could be a commercial success in the US where drivers have resorted to placing inflatable dolls in the passenger seat to avoid fines for driving alone in car pool lanes.

Via Reuters, the only website to report the news. Anyone can confirm that this is not a hoax?

MIT SENSEable City Lab (famous for Mobile Landscape Graz) is working on the Real Time Rome project for the 2006 Venice Biennale of architecture.

The project combines different datasets in a single interface to reveal the rhythm of the city in real time. RTR aggregates mobility of people according to their mobile phone usage and visualizes it synchronously with the flux of public transit, pedestrians, and traffic to better understand patterns of daily life in Rome and show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment.

The data of the movements of a mobile phone location will be anonymously visualized on a map. The algorithms used are able to spot the difference between a slow mobile phone in the pocket of a pedestrian or the phone of a driver stuck in one of Rome's monstruous traffic jams.

Using this instrument, one would be able to choose the fastest street to get to lunch but also the quietest restaurant. An analysis of country codes gives detailed information about the flow of tourists: where are Germans going? how do Japanese move in the city? Combining traffic and public transport data will help understand if the number of buses available matches the density and requirements of usage. Users would be able to check on their phone screen the nearest taxi or parking space.

Rome was chosen as test bed for the project because "in 1748, Nolli's map of Rome introduced modern cartography," explains Carlo Ratti, Director of senseable. "The maps of the future will be huge database that will enable us to extract fragments that suit our needs, like we can do today on Internet".

Maps of Rome.

Via PPF and la repubblica. Second image from Roma, the 1972 movie by Fellini.