Of Bikes and Virtual Worlds

Bicycles today are interfaces between civility and nature, between poetics and technological evolution. Jeffrey Shaw's classical piece The Legible City (1989) involves a stationary bicycle in the context of visual poetry, 3D texts, and geometries of uninhabited cities. The Legible City is an interface to virtual worlds. Text-shaped cities are projected and explored by visitors in a journey of reading. Twenty-two years after Shaw's work, one can use a stationary bicycle to travel through richer worlds, which are narrative applications of geography updated periodically such as Google Earth. In this sense students of Animation and Digital Art program at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Toluca, Mexico, developed four process art applications, using and adapting physical interfaces and videogame motion capture devices as their own take on Shaw's work.