The Legible City, Jeffrey Shaw

 Linda talked about situationist international, and also told us to do the research of Jeffrey Shaw's work----The Legible City. Jeffrey Shaw combined  the lettrist and drifting in his work. Let's see what he have done.

This is a video of the Legible City which was demonstrating how the device worked. I've downloaded it from Jeffrey's website.(http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/)

Here's some pictures of the Legible City.

 





The Legible city is a computergraphic installation by Jeffrey Shaw. He tried to transform some real cities in our world into "readable" cities in virtual world, that's why he named it "Legible City". He used the actual groundplans of three cities: Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe in his works, then he created three virtual computergraphic cities in a 3-dimentional form which consisted of letters, words and sentences written and complied by Dirk Groeneveld. Those textual formations were representing the buildings and barriers in the cities.

The textual city was projected on a big screen in front of a real bicycle, and the handlebar pedals of the bike were the direction and speed controller . Therefore, audiences could travel arround the city by continuing physical movement of cycling, which make people like really entering the virtual world----you can go anywhere and see the things you want to see. Moreover, there is another small  monitor screen placed on the bike that can show the map of the virtual city and also the momentary position of the cyclist. It is quite user-friendly indeed.

In fact, the three cities of Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe are three different versions of legible city project. They had distinct features in their own version.In the Mahattan version has eight separate fictional story lines in the form of naration monologues by eight kind of people, they all had different statuses: including ex-Mayor Koch, Frank Lloyd Wright, Donald Trump, a tour guide, a confidence trickster, an ambassador and a taxi-driver. Audiences could choose one of the lines or even all of them so that they could have different experience with different type of guides and particular narration. Besides, the two others cities scaled the letters to the similar poportion and location of the buildings in the real city, which mean the text in these two versions were reflecting the actual appearence of achitectures in the actual world.
 Jeffrey used a very interesting way to show us a different view of those cities that people were familiar with. It was demonstrating an extraordinary landscape of the ordinary cities. Just like what the intoduction in the website says:Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning. Maybe all the text inside the virtual cities had their meaning; maybe they were revealing the history of the buildings or the features of that place...I don't know. Sadly, I have no chance to participate in it, what I can see in these photos and videos are only fragmental words and phrase and they are not clear to see.

Apart from the three versions above, there was a new one released in 1998:

The new Legible City showed a more advanced technology than before. Bicyclist was not alone anymore as there were not only one but more than two bicylists took part in the virtual world travel.  They were connected by a network so they can get into the game at the same time. However, they may not travel in the same path, they would start at different point and then they could meet each other in some places. Well, it seems much more interesting than the previous versions as it just like an online game that multi players can play. Also, the new version of the textual buildings became actually "readable" because the content of the words and sentences were richer and more meaningful. They generated diverse atmosphere in different areas through the power of words. Audiences could have interaction and conversation with the other players, this comprised a virtual society that made the Legible City to become more realistic, more close to the reality.

In the leature, we learnt about the lettrist. Jeffrey's work of Legible City presented the idea of it. He used letters to replace the real building but he kept the original ground plan of the actual city. He looked like to be distructing the reality but he was actually construting a new world by computergraphic. Letters were transformed into visual landscape which was a n innovative idea about letters and words. He was also mixed with the idea of walking was an art form---- audience could drift around the virtual city and enjoy their own path or way that they want to use to visit the legible city in a new angle and view. More importantly, he tried to connect his work to daily life and his art work could not be completed without the participation of audience.