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Both factors contribute to the high cost of maintaining this work. By tracing the complex evolution of this artwork since its first presentation inthis paper aims to illuminate the various strategies employed by the ZKM for the maintenance and preservation of this installation over the course of the past twenty years. A bicycle exercise bike installed in the exhibition space functions as an interface, which visitors can ride and pedal through the streets to decipher the text.
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This city made up of words is in fact a simulation of actually existing cities, as it was created based on maps of the cities of Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe. The text in Manhattan consists of eight fictional stories in which such characters as taxi drivers and the mayor of New York City at the time appear, while the other two texts were taken from documents of historical events.
Regarding the conservation of media art, up to this point ZKM and many other museums have been focusing mainly on the conservation of hardware. This interactive installation was first shown at the Bonnefanten Museum, in Maastricht, where its apparatus was a CRT monitor and a custom-designed joystick.
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For this work the authors researched the conceptual and aesthetic paradigms of the Legible City using a simple wire-frame method of interactive visual representation. The viewers used the joystick to control their movement through a 3-D virtual world populated with letters and words that constituted a number of narratives that could be read as one travelled in any direction through this urban landscape.
The handlebar and pedals of the interface bicycle give the viewer interactive control over 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.