You sit on a bicycle inside a gallery and pedal into a city made of words. Turn the handlebars and the street turns with you. The buildings are letters; your route becomes a way of reading. 1
Now imagine another artwork on a phone. It watches your face while you watch a story about surveillance. Your gaze and expressions help determine where the story goes. 2
Both works make the visitor part of the art. The difference between them opens a question that reaches far beyond the gallery: what changes when a system responds not just to what we deliberately do, but to what it thinks our bodies reveal?
Pedaling through a city of words
In The Legible City, Jeffrey Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld made a virtual city navigable by bicycle. Visitors pedal and steer through a projected environment whose architecture is made from text. The route is not simply shown to them: they choose where to go. 1
The work is interactive without requiring a modern AI model. Its interface makes the visitor's intention relatively plain. Push the pedals to move; turn the handlebars to change direction. The experience still depends on the artist's design—someone chose the city, the words and the controls—but the visitor participates by exploring them.
A story that reads its viewer
Karen Palmer's Consensus Gentium puts that relationship under pressure. The interactive film places its participant in a fictional society governed by surveillance. According to the Ars Electronica archive, the experience uses a phone's camera and facial detection to respond to cues including gaze and expressions as its narrative branches. 2
The premise is unsettling because the story's fictional system assesses the participant while the artwork itself uses sensing to shape the encounter. Palmer uses the tension to explore surveillance, algorithmic bias and the consequences of systems that make judgments about people. 2
A camera can record a face. It cannot directly observe a person's thoughts. Any claim that software can infer an intention or emotional state from a look needs scrutiny; a narrative response is not proof that the interpretation is right.
Choosing, sensing and being seen
The difference between the bicycle and the phone is not that one artwork is interactive and the other is not. It is what counts as input. In one, steering is a deliberate physical action. In the other, a glance or expression can become material for a system's interpretation.
That distinction gives viewers a useful set of questions. What does the work ask permission to sense? What can a participant choose not to reveal? How does the interpretation affect what happens next? Those answers depend on the particular installation and its operators; the archive description alone does not establish every venue's data practices.
Interactive art can make an invisible bargain tangible. We arrive expecting to look. The work invites us to notice the systems that look back—and to consider who gets to decide what they see.
References
- The Legible City. (n.d.). https://zkm.de/en/artworks/the-legible-city
- Consensus Gentium. (n.d.). https://archive.aec.at/prix/290652/