One Street Tweeter - the Twitter-powered road-painting printer
By Ben Coxworth
May 18, 2012
The One Street Tweeter is sort of like a giant towed inkjet printer, which paints Tweeted messages on the road
Image Gallery (7 images)The G8 Summit, the annual meeting of leaders from eight of the world’s largest economies, is always a popular venue for protestors who don’t like what some of those leaders are doing. While you may not be able to make it to this year’s upcoming event in Maryland, an advocacy group known as One could still get your message out – by using what could best be described as a giant inkjet printer to paint it on the street.
The towed device, known as the One Street Tweeter, uses non-toxic water-soluble paint to print messages on the road. Those messages can be submitted through One’s website or Twitter account (hence the use of the word “Tweeter”), and can be up to 40 characters long. They’re printed at a speed of 5 mph (8 km/h), so brief messages are probably best.
The One Street Tweeter started printing messages around Maryland and Washington DC this week. The group is still welcoming messages, as long as they have something to do with motivating the leaders to address the issues of hunger and poverty. If your message is used, they’ll send you a photo of it.
It’s a little reminiscent of Canadian media artist Nicholas Hanna’s Water Calligraphy Device, a tricycle that uses water jets to print messages on the streets of Beijing.
An experienced freelance writer, videographer and television producer, Ben's interest in all forms of innovation is particularly fanatical when it comes to human-powered transportation, film-making gear, environmentally-friendly technologies and anything that's designed to go underwater. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where he spends a lot of time going over the handlebars of his mountain bike, hanging out in off-leash parks, and wishing the Pacific Ocean wasn't so far away. All articles by Ben Coxworth
"Graffiti hits the road"
At least they use water-soluble ink so those tweets shouldn't stay around for too long...
agulesin21st May, 2012 @ 05:27 am PDT
Just curious-
How is that legal?
Wouldn't they be liable if somebody wrecked while reading?
I'd think people are distracted enough already...
Griffin21st May, 2012 @ 11:27 am PDT
Or Login with Facebook:
Just enter your friends and your email address into the form below
For multiple addresses, separate each with a comma
Privacy is safe with us because we have a strict privacy policy.





What does it need a huge water cooled deisel generator for? Surely it cant draw so much power it couldn't run on batteries?
domshmom21st May, 2012 @ 01:10 am PDT