Idle Hands was pleased to present Ground Truth, a project by Brooklyn-based artist Justin Blinder developed through the inaugural Idle Hands Incubation Award.

Can a bike ride reveal the hidden pressures of a city?

The lived economic conditions of New Yorkers often arrive as abstract numbers: census data, heat maps, rent medians, and credit scores. Flattened in this way, they reduce experience to statistics and complex human stories to quantitative data. Ground Truth, the inaugural Idle Hands Incubation Award project by recipient Justin Blinder, used New York's public bike-share infrastructure to unflatten this data through a custom-built device that modulated physical resistance while pedaling based on a housing affordability dataset. The project invited riders to encounter inequality through their own movement and effort.

Ground Truth emerged from Blinder's experience working as a bicycle courier during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he spent long days crossing neighborhoods that felt economically and psychologically worlds apart despite being only blocks from one another. Considering how a bicycle promises unfettered freedom of movement, Blinder questioned what frictions remain invisible when the city is represented as a flat, equally accessible surface.


By translating housing affordability data into embodied experience, Ground Truth made these frictions tangible at a tactile level. Over the course of the three-month Idle Hands Incubation Award, Blinder refined the technology, datasets, design, and engineering behind the project's custom-built device, developing a work that moved between conceptual art, social inquiry, and technical intervention.

The exhibition presented the modified bicycle alongside an interactive housing affordability map, research materials and project documentation, an artist talk, a fireside conversation with invited expert guests, and a short film tracing the project throughout New York City.

Explore > THE MAP

Read more > GROUND TRUTH

OPENING RECEPTION
July 31st, 6-9pm EST

The opening of the Ground Truth exhibition with the Idle Hands community.

FIRESIDE CHAT
August 1st, 2-3:30pm EST

A conversation moderated by Kate Blumm with Justin Blinder, Council Member Lincoln Restler and Dasia Jenkins, exploring housing affordability, displacement, and the realities shaping New York City today.

ARTIST TALK
August 2nd, 2-3pm EST

Justin Blinder provided an inside look at the technical development, research, and engineering behind Ground Truth.