What's a boomtown without poorly-regulated transportation? Rustlr Rideshare brings Silicon Valley's "disruption" to the Wild West with 100 wooden hobby horses available for public use across festival grounds. Participants grab a steed from one of five hitching posts and gallop off into the sunset—though the horses make getting anywhere exactly zero percent easier. This large-scale participatory installation satirizes modern rideshare culture while enabling emergent shenanigans: impromptu races, cattle drives, horse theft, and general ramblin'. Like Lime scooters, the horses end up scattered across the landscape, periodically wrangled by volunteer "Ranch Hands."
As project lead, I coordinated a collaborative team of six builders, designers, and fabricators working in a flat hierarchy. Together we prototyped designs, managed a $2,000 budget, hand-built 100 hobby horses, constructed five hitching posts, and deployed this ambitious installation across multiple festival sites—transforming infrastructure into performance art.
