While it’s true that LiveWire has a certain vision of the future, it wants to electrify more than just bikes. Take CURRENT, its design co-op, which is clearly intended to electrify imaginations with its interdisciplinary creations. Artists from a variety of fields came together to craft the first CURRENT project, Dr. Woo’s custom LiveWire One, which he calls Silent Dancer.
Tattoo artist Dr. Woo came together with Mikey Ojeda of Bleach Design Werks, as well as SMCO, GoodArt Hlywd, Race Service, and Bcomp to breathe life into this project. Race Service is where the LiveWire CURRENT residency is based, and where Ojeda coordinated the other artists to bring Dr. Woo’s bike design to fruition. (At the same time, Woo and Ojeda concurrently came up with the capsule streetwear collection that’s being given away on the LiveWire website at the time of writing.)
The design process is chronicled in a YouTube video series on LiveWire’s channel, which gives an overview of the initial design, various steps along the way, and also the completed project. As with any good project, the really cool parts are in the details—such as Bcomp’s Amplitex material, which it used to craft custom bodywork for the LiveWire. Instead of using boring old carbon fiber, they used a new material made of flax fiber—which they say is less dirty and is more sustainable, but offers some amazing visual appeal.
Over at GoodArt Hlywd, several sterling silver detail pieces were hand-crafted using what they call a subtractive process of any part of the silver block that doesn’t belong to the finished shape they can visualize in their mind’s eye. You’ll hear sculpters in multiple media talk about subtractive processes a lot, and the importance of visualizing your finished object before you start working on bringing it forth from your media. It doesn’t matter if no one else can see it at first; as long as the artist can see it and can walk themselves through the steps to bring it out, then soon enough, everyone else will see it, too.
In the end, all the pieces come together from the various artists involved in bringing Dr. Woo’s vision to life, and the finished bike is what you see in this video. What do you think?
