There is now Wi-Fi access on the New York City subway. Well, only on the "L" train. Okay, just the last two cars of the L train, on a portion of the line, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Only for the week of Nov. 14–19.

'We've created a captive audience media channel'OK — subway Wi-Fi is still as rare as New York's non-existent subway mobile phone service. But a little experiment that has combined some roguish impulses, a bit of minimalist tech prowess and a "just do it" mentality is showing what might be possible.

Using 15 portable battery-powered web servers hidden in shopping bags, a nascent creative agency called WeMakeCoolSh.it is creating temporary pirate Wi-Fi hotspots in select subway cars, allowing mobile devices in range to access a public intranet complete with chat room, news, and original content from local artists and writers. The name of the project – which (perhaps unintentionally) also works as a pun on the state of the subway service in recent years – is the "L Train Notwork."

On a recent ride-along, I got to see the stealthy team in action.

One by one, members of the team board Manhattan-bound trains from the Morgan Avenue station in Brooklyn, each carrying a green cloth tote bag containing a server, router, power inverter, and 12-volt battery tucked into a shoebox. They also carried slick, iPhone-styled flyers explaining how to access the network. When logged on, users were greeted with a retro-web interface with 8-bit graphics and links to the "Missed Connections" chat and other sections highlighted in pixilated glowing green text.

"Our notion was to first appeal to creative people," says co-founder Matthew McGregor-Mento about the content selection, which is on-target for the artsy-geek contingent commonly riding that stretch of the line.

Continue reading 'All Aboard New York City's Geek Train' ...

There's an xkcd gallery in the "images" section if that's any indication, and selected headlines from Boing Boing, Gawker, Laughing Squid, The New York Times, and other sources are featured in "feeds," which gives the option to e-mail story links to oneself, as rights weren't secured for the self-funded, week-long run.

'We don't want to be the subway content people. We don't want to do the same thing over and over. We'll definitely walk away from the technology when it's no longer challenging to us.'Mark Krawczuk, who co-founded the agency/collective with McGregor-Mento over six months ago, says they have no plans to make this their primary business, despite the lucrative potential. "We'd love to go do this for other folks, but Matt and I mainly want to open doors to other conversations," he told Wired.com.

Indeed, they're planning a symposium in the coming weeks to explain the process to others, as well as to open source the code. "We're looking to be the next generation of creative director team," said Krawczuk."It used to be just about a writer and a designer, but now everything is very different."

The tech is mostly off the shelf — there is a tiny amount of bespoke code — and with that: "We've created a captive audience media channel," says McGregor-Mento. "It was the decisions we made with the interface; the design; picking the trains; how we deployed people — the tech was one small piece of that."

Applications will also surely come from the minds of others. Rafi Diaz, a 23-year-old assistant game designer who tried the L Train Notwork said, "I can totally see this expanding; this could be great for mobile gaming."

Which is not to say there weren't challenges. They found out at the last minute that routers were needed in the package to handle the number of users, and one day half the system wouldn't go online until their programmer, Sean McIntyre, frantically concocted a fix. But no matter the technology, stress the partners, it is usefulness and artistry that best serve brands — though usefulness is in the hand of the beholder.

"It can give you something you want, in a place where you want it," says McGregor-Mento of the Notworks.

While most of the commuters approached were receptive, a bearded man who looked like a prime demographic candidate just wanted to read his book, and one woman in her twenties was excited until she realized she couldn't access Facebook. "It's a closed network," McGregor-Mento explained, "it's not the real internet." But still she smiled and poked around the features, saying she'd also try it the next day.

Then there's the notion of artistic integrity, which plenty of creatives will agree takes a beating from paranoid clients who talk about originality and risk, but never fail to fall back to the vanilla, the chicken, or that thing a competitor did that seemed to go okay. "The trick when commerce approaches art," says McGregor-Mento, "is to honor the artist." Brands do best when they let the artist do his or her thing, he said, and then just present themselves as simply identifying with or supporting the work.

Says Krawczuk, "it's how brands can become patrons instead of patronizing."

But don't look for these guys to, say, make the big leap to the "1" train which services (in part) the tony Upper West Side of Manhattan. "We don't want to be the subway content people," says McGregor-Mento. "We don't want to do the same thing over and over. We'll definitely walk away from the technology when it's no longer challenging to us."

In the meantime, MTV has already contacted them about setting up Notworks to introduce people to new music at all manner of events.

But in the end it's still more about just doing it than getting it done.

"We need to do things for ourselves as makers, too," Krawczuk said. "We make cool shit — that’s our company name because that's what we want to do."