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TypeMap: Bikelane Toronto | IA Gateway
Opening reception: May 27, 6–8PM | Register here
Gallery hours: May 28 – 29, 11–6PM
Bikelane Toronto is the first installment of TypeMap, a series of interactive maps built entirely out of words. Bikelane Toronto focuses on downtown Toronto's biking infrastructure. Every street in the city appears as its own name, color coded by its bike lane coverage. The texts are typeset to form the shape of the city.
The project documents how cycling infrastructure has grown, stalled, and occasionally taken away across Toronto since 2001. Streets with no bike lane quietly appear in grey; ones with shared routes, painted lanes, or fully protected tracks each carry a different color. Visitors can trace the development through time—streets changing colors, or fade back to grey over the years. Two decades of urban planning and politics encapsulated in a landscape of changing colors and morphing texts.
The project is inspired by Paula Scher, the American graphic designer whose typographic maps of cities like New York and London replaced every river, park, and borough boundary with densely packed words. Her maps revealed that geography could be made entirely of language, and that text arranged with enough intention becomes a place. We borrow that logic and fill it with civic data.
In the gallery, the map is projected on a single wall in a dark room. At that scale, street names become the size of actual street signage, and legible from a distance. Visitors would be able to interact with the map through a trackpad on a pedestal.
About the Artists
Jerry Wang is a media artist and designer whose practice lives at the intersection of typography, interaction, and cultural memory. Working primarily through interactive web-based works, he uses type, color, and graphic form as his primary materials to construct visual experiences where language and image carry the weight of identity, belonging, and place. As a first-generation immigrant, his work examines how online and physical cultural spaces shape the self: who we become, where we feel at home, and how we relate to others across cultural distance.
Yufeng Zhao's work addresses data, imagery / language processing, and experience design, exploring unexpected connections embedded in our techno-cultural landscape and the interactions between humans and machines. Through a blend of web-based experiences, video works, and tangible installations, Yufeng's practice investigates the intersections of data, computer graphics, and human interactions.
About IA Gateway
The InterAccess Gateway (IA Gateway) program facilitates low-barrier, no-cost access to gallery space for new media artists within our community. Gateway is an entry point; the term refers to network gateways, telecommunication devices that allow for the flow and translation of data between separate networks, an apt metaphor for the responsibility of organizations to provide resources and support to the artists in their community. IA Gateway was first held in 2024.