The Bike’s Journey

The Bike’s Journey is an interactive art piece inspired by the comparison of an outdoor bicycle and an exercise-machine bicycle, a standstill household item. The rider participating in the piece joins a dreamy journey to the outside world of a bike that has never touched a real road. The bike asks its rider to help make decisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in each scenario, which brings both of them to different endings.

—“When I venture into the world”—

Interaction

The participant rides the bike like a normal exercise bike. The main story is based around a cycling community’s underground race, a new event in the 21st century. While racing along the route, the participant will face various situations requiring them to make a decision between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ There will be a prompt each time, with limited time for them to answer. To answer ‘yes’, they pedal the bicycle forward, and pedal the opposite way for ‘no.’

When someone starts riding, the beginning screen shows an ordinary retro-style exercise interface. Then, in a very short time, the text on the screen changes to greet the rider. The bike then asks its rider whether they want to join its dreamy journey to the outside world.

Usually, most 1990’s-era exercise machines can collect a user’s information, such as gender, height, weight, and age, to calculate a result to their exercise that is then shown to them on the LCD screen. The old-fashioned LCD screen is a part that connects the human to the machine by showing what the machine has detected and collated, and shows its results, such as pulse, strength, speed of pedal, user information, or calories burnt. To express the old-fashioned machine’s vision, pixel art is used to mix today’s LCD screen with the old LCD style in this artwork.

The story in the interaction always begins at the cyclist event somewhere in a big city. Many cyclists have joined the event. After making some decisions, the participant will see scenes that do not come reproduced from the “real world,” but from real media content, such as classic 90’s games and cartoons. There are also numerous endings to be explored.