Barbora Patkova

Barbora behind a bike generator, inside the container where Magnificent Revolutions keep bits and pieces

As far as I can tell, Barbora hasn’t done anything to look especially good for the interview. If she’s wearing make-up, it’s pretty subtle. But then, it’s quite apparent that she doesn’t have to do anything to look good: her figure is just right, her hair is a lovely shade of blonde, her features are chiselled, her eyes are clear and grey, her smile is stunning. It doesn’t surprise me when, at one point in the interview, she confesses that as a teenager she dreamed of becoming a model. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture her in any advert holding any product, associating her natural beauty to some company’s brand.

But Barbora has gone a long way away from those teenage dreams. Today, Barbora is best known for Magnificent Revolution, a project that demonstrates how much energy it takes to power some things we take for granted. In her own words: “We run events, cinema events and music events, and the whole thing is based on pedal power. It’s powered by the people. With screenings, people ride to the them and they can hook the bike to the generator and they can power the screening itself, they’re powering the audio-visual equipment. With the music, people are powering the band, this is a new relationship between the band and the audience. The ultimate idea behind it is to experience a connection, to be able to see something that you normally can’t, which is energy. When you say to somebody 1,000 Watts, it’s completely meaningless, because they have no way of imagining what that is. By being able to be a physical part of it, being there creating electricity, feeling what is 50 Watts or 100 Watts from a human perspective, people can start feeling these connections that then can help them later in life when they’re thinking about saving energy. We’re not telling anyone anything, we let people experience it. It’s something that comes from within.”

A person generates 50 Watts on average, but there is a lot of variability among different people. Have you ever seen on the Internet one of those pictures of a geek powering a laptop by pedalling and you wondered if that’s possible? The answer is yes: “You can do it, but it’s better to charge the laptop while it’s turned off. If it’s running, it depends what you’ve got open, what you’re working on. It can be 50 to 70 Watts. It’s at the high end of what you can power, but of course it depends on how fit you are.”

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.

Thoughts

Magnificent Revolution brings to life a concept I learned about as a child: the energy slave. I learned this from a wonderful book called How energy works, a typical product of the oil crisis of the seventies. It explained, with clear, attractive pictures and simple explanations absolutely everything you need to know about energy: what it is, how it can be produced, the laws of thermodynamics, and more. One of the beautiful two-page spreads of the book showed graphically the concept of energy slave, with a family of four standing on top of a mountain of human figures, representing their energy servants.

An energy slave is the amount of energy that a person can generate using their muscles. Different authors give it different values - it depends on how fit your slave is – but it’s generally estimated that the average person in the Western world uses roughly as much energy as would be produced by 100 slaves. The Europeans and Japanese use somewhat less, the North Americans somewhat more. Roughly thirty of those slaves (the fastest, presumably) are pulling cars, buses, trains, and even the planes that we use. Twenty-three are pulling the tractors and other machinery that produce our food.

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.