In Germany, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe is a promising high tech workshop, museum, and study center. The ZKM follows in the spirit of Sonia Sheridan's Generative Systems Workshop at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester in the 1970s, and the Visible Language Workshop at MIT (before it was subsumed within the Media Lab where corporate needs precede art). Karlsruhe's ZKM offers artist residencies employing apparatus ranging from Macintosh to Silicon Graphics workstations and encourages the development of new experiential environments ranging from stereoscopic perception to physical effects using a flight simulator platform. Jeffrey Shaw directs the Institute for Media Image within the ZKM. Recent works by Shaw and Agnes Hegedüs employ novel means to explore simulated spaces.
In "The Legible City," Shaw invites the viewer to mount a fixed bicycle and peddle though a virtual city composed of letter forms lining the actual city plan of Manhattan, and other European cities. The letter forms create narratives that one can reorganize by steering different routes through the city. While "The Legible City" and the recent "Virtual Museum" use the most powerful graphics computers available to generate real-time responses within fascinating spaces, one almost feel like there should be some boundaries or at least difficulties. If you bump into a wall, you just go through it like Alice through the looking glass. At the present time, there are few real consequences for the traveler in Cyberspace.