The Legible City (1989) // Jeffrey Shaw

In this piece, the partaker rides a stationary bike through a simulated representation of a city composed of computer generated three-dimensional letters forming words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Ground plans of actual cities, consisting of Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe, were used to develop it, except all of the architecture was replaced by the textual formations complied by Dirk Groeneveld.  The visitor is given interactive control over the bicycle by the handlebar and pedals, which decides direction and speed travelled and therefore the physical effort of cycling in the real world  is transposed into the virtual environment. The piece represents a journey of reading by travelling through a city of words. Depending on the path chosen, there will be spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning. The installation consists of a video projector  to project the visuals on to a large screen and another small monitor placed in front of the bike to show a ground plan of each city, an indicator showing where the cyclist is at any particular moment.