Jeffrey
Shaw
1998
Network Installation
In The Legible City (1989) the visitor rides a
stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that
is constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters, forming words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Using the
ground plans of actual cities - Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe
- the existing architecture is completely replaced
by textual formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld. Travelling
through the cities of words is consequently a journey of reading. The choice of
path one takes is a choice of texts as well as the spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.
The handlebar and pedals of the interface bicycle provide the viewer
interactive control over the direction and speed of travel. The physical
effort of cycling in the real world is gratuitously transposed into
the virtual environment, affirming a conjunction of the active body
in the virtual domain. A video projector is used to project the computer-generated
image onto a large screen. Another small monitor screen in front of
the bicycle shows a simple ground plan of each city, with an indicator
showing the momentary position of the cyclist.
The Distributed Legible City encompasses all the experiences
offered by the original version (The Legible City, 1989),
but introduces an important new multi-user functionality that to a
large extent becomes its predominant feature. In The Distributed
Legible City there are two or more bicyclists at remote locations
who are simultaneously present in the virtual environment. They can
meet each other (by accident or intentionally), see abstracted avatar
representations of each other, and can verbally communicate with each other when in close contact.
While The Distributed Legible City shows the same urban textual
landscape as the original Legible City, the database now
takes on a new meaning. The texts are no longer the sole focus of
the user's experience. Instead it is con-text (both in terms
of scenery and content) for the possible meetings, and resulting conversations
(meta-texts), between the bicyclists. In this way a rich new space
of co-mingled spoken and readable texts is generated. The artwork has changed from being merely a visual experience, to becoming
a visual ambiance for social exchange between the visitors.
As a result of the increasingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet
and the maturing of 3D interaction techniques, there is a growing
need to define aesthetic frameworks for the technological development
of new social interaction and interface paradigms for content rich,
inter-connected, shared virtual environments.The Distributed Legible City
has become a context for exploration of these issues, adding a space
of distributed multi-user social engagement to the space of interactive
spectacle. This paradigm is a novel one for art, embedding and transforming
its representational practices in the new and evolving net condition.
Exhibitions:
1998: surrogate 1, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; IST98, Vienna, Austria.
1999: European 5th Framework Conference, Essen, Germany; net_condition,
ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria.
Credits:
Hardware: Andreas Schiffler
Software: Adrian West and Gideon May
Modelling: Sabine Hirtes
Produced at the ZKM Institute for Visual Media, Karlsruhe, Germany,
in the context of the Esprit i3 European Long Term Research project
'eSCAPE', and in close cooperation with the University of Manchester,
UK.
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