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Jeffrey Shaw «The Legible City» | The Legible City (installation view)
Jeffrey Shaw, «The Legible City», 1988 – 1991
The Legible City (installation view) | © ;


 Jeffrey Shaw
«The Legible City»

Visitors to ‘The Legible City', created at the Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt/M., are seated on a stationary bicycle and ‘move' through streets projected onto the surface in front of them. In contrast to those of a normal city, the streets here are literally legible, lined not by buildings but by letters. On their passage through the city, cyclist-visitors can pursue various narrative threads, accumulating their own history of the city. On a small display on the handlebars is a map of the city on which the cyclists can plot their position. Between 1988 and 1991 Jeffrey Shaw created three versions of ‘The Legible City': Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe. The Manhattan variant was one of the very first interactive installations, today regarded as a key work of the genre.