Biking through a Book

So the idea starts with hearing a CBC radio interview with a Fine Arts professor from the University of Regina who was virtually cycling across Canada using Google Maps. Apparently she was using a not too complicated system of connecting her stationary bike to Google Maps, and furthermore, people could also connect their stationary bikes to the same journey and join her. So having been quite fascinated with this idea, I began to wonder if you could take text encoding and map that to a similar physical kind of landscape experience; in other words, if you connected your stationary bike to an eBook, you could experience text encoding through an environment, and possibly experience it with other people. It could be in inside of a building, a rural setting, a village, a city, a long extended journey through many different environments, in space, and could include sounds, music, or be experienced in silence. Each (encoded) text is ultimately unique, and therefore could generate a unique physical experience as well. So a text could be read (reading in and of itself is an experience) and it could also be experienced with all your senses – you could walk through it, bike though it, etc. Seeing encoding in this way could then also potentially impact or enrich the encoding of texts, or could simply be a new way of experiencing a written work. Reading of course is an immersive act, and it would be a playful, experimental notion.

Time’s up. I better post this before I become too self-conscious about it. 

For more information:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/regina-artist-biking-across-canada-1.3396077

and:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Google-Maps-Exercise-Bike-Virtual-Bike-Ride/