Exploring expanded cinema through Jeffrey Shaw's Legible City

The concept of expanding cinema emerged in 1960s an 1970s, when artists of the generation attempted to revolutionize the cinema experience. Their challenged the fact that most of the films only provides passive entertainment, as they add elements to their films in order to activate the audience to engage different activities as they watching. 

This opened a movement which artists challenges the existing narrative and format of the cinema. Borrowing from the Lettrist Movement of mid-20th century, artists break down and restructure cinema in to varieties of inter-media perceptual experience. While discarding majority of the traditional narratives, expanded cinemas presents audience with contents from entirely different creative perspectives, as artist can engage the audience at their liberty.

Take Jeffrey Shaw' Legible City(1989) as an example. When viewing this artwork, one of audience was invited to ride on a bicycle set up for the installation. This bicycle then controlled the view that was projected on the screen in front of the audience. As the rider changed his/her speed and steer another way, the motion and direction were also simultaneously brought into the projected view. 

As the title tells, the virtual space which the audience drove on was a city in concept. However, instead of a realistic city with dense buildings and hustling traffic, the city was composed of blocks of words laid according the plan of existing cities such as Manhattan and Amsterdam. These words could be formed into sentences of message, but only when rider guessed and rode along the correct path. In this way, the viewers (and especially the rider) are invited into an unordinary adventure.

As we can see, Legible City delivered an experience of expanded cinema. It is "cinema" as it utilized projection and camera-based image. At same time, such cinema experience is "expanded" as the audience participation was also key part of the artwork, with unordinary content and format entirely different from traditional film story telling.

Sources:

Tate. (n.d.). Expanded cinema | Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/e/expanded-cinema 

Legible city. (n.d.). Jeffrey Shaw Compendium. https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/portfolio/legible-city/