Rippling Outwardly: Archives With Augmented And Mixed Reality

Augmented reality (AR) art is a form of artistic expression that complicates traditional notions of the visual arts. A visual AR artist trades in what we might call invisible visualities. In this essay, I consider the questions why does AR art matter as a cultural form of expression? and what does AR art contribute to contemporary technoliterary theoretical discourse? by putting several recent AR artworks into dialogue with some of today’s most important literary-media theorists.

2021

The paper aims to show Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) artworks are increasingly taking the form of walking tours across the city. These installations in urban space transform the viewer into an experiencer. Indeed such artworks consist in perceptual environments, which give new menanings to known places thanks to virtual objects. They can elicit a strong sense of presence into the visitor, who is free to build different paths related to the artwork both in time and space, using her own mobile devices. AR an MR artworks use immersive, multimedia, and interactive storytelling, which modifies everyday context affordances. The actual environment results from the intertwining of the physical and the digital. Artists like Keiichi Matsuda, in HYPER-REALITY (2016), and Magali Barbé, in Strange Beasts (2017), have imagined the most dystopian and alarming aspects that could emerge from new virtual technologies. However, AR and MR artworks reveal potentialities impossible to obtain through any other medium. The article will discuss some relevant examples such as the [AR]T project (2019), organized by the New Museum of New

The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art, 2020

This chapter investigates a set of artistic and activist augmented reality (AR) projects that in various ways revolve around the curation of urban, public, and institutional spaces. These projects demonstrate intersections between principles of design, mobile design, and performative cartography, and urban curation—principles that we can recognize in various art projects that aim to intervene into the set infrastructures of public space, experimental forms of curation making use of AR technology, or projects that hack into institutionally embedded forms of “on-site” museum exhibition. What these different projects share, beside the use of AR technologies, is their experimentation with the affordances of this technology for a mobile, spatial curation that blurs the boundaries between the art project and the wider contours of public and/or institutional space, and also fundamentally reconfigures the relationship between these parameters and the viewing subject. Through a comparison of different forms of curatorial ARtivism—or experimental and activist mobile media curation by means of AR technology—various archival, architectural, and cartographic principles of this navigational AR-based curatorial design can be discerned. This chapter examines several artistic and/or activist AR projects from the early years of the medium, as well as more recent projects—making use of various digital but also analog AR technologies—alongside a few iconic AR interventions in the exhibition spaces of institutions such as MoMA, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—whether endorsed by these institutions or “unauthorized.” With these archival, architectural, and cartographic principles of curatorial ARtivism in mind, we can begin to see a body of work that is as variegated as it is experimental, yet one that not only represents a significant genre of mobile media art, but also fundamentally redefines existing institutional principles and categories of art curation.

Augmented Reality Art From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium, 2018

Treading a fine line between intimacy and extension, there is no doubt that mobile media devices such as tablets and smartphones, have been making a serious con- tribution to the expressive power of human bodies. The threshold that has tradi- tionally separated human and machine has shifted, so that the virtual and physical are no longer separate topologies, but rather embodied together in the immediacy of the everyday: the body, like the smartphone, is an interface. But that is not all, because, bit by bit (or byte by byte) mobile media devices have been turning us into post-humans (Hayles 1999; Braidotti 2013). It is not that the devices are some kind of Cyborgian appendage to the human body, although an argument for this could certainly be made. Rather, these new threads weaving themselves into the geo- cultural fabric of humanity are created through the increasingly dominant organi- sational force of software. The data network, cloud, or Internet have many uses in life, and perhaps the least of these is artistic. Yet, it is art that is now being revolutionised by the same data networks that produced pervasive computing. Through these innovations artists have been given the capacity to transport audi- ences into complex meshworks of narrative and experience. The pervasive use of smartphones has created many new lines of critical inquiry that intersect with notions of post-humanism, such as the shaping of human culture through a myriad of physical, embodied, and perceptual connections with the technological machines we use regularly. One such line of inquiry is posited by the radical and highly experimental artistic practice of mobile Augmented Reality Art [ARt].

21st International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA 2015, Vancouver, B.C. August 2015.

As an emergent hybrid form that challenges and extends already established 'fine art' categories, augmented reality art deployed on portable mobile devices ( tablets & smartphones) fundamentally eschews models found in the conventional 'art world.' It should not, however, be considered as inscribing a new 'model:' rather, this paper posits that the hybrids advanced by mobile augmented reality art [AR(t)] are closely related to the notion of the 'machinic assemblage' ( Deleuze & Guatarri 1987), where a deep capacity to re-assemble marks each new art-event. This paper suggests a new discursive formulation to deal with this type of hybrid art practice, positing the notion of the 'software assemblage.'

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2005

Following Annie Coombes's and Avtar Brah's (authors of Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, 2000) request that we not merely apply but in fact historicise hybridity, and arguing that the art and science explorations of new media art have produced some of the strongest new media hybridities to date, the author focuses on one of the important fields of investigation currently linking media art, science and technology: augmented reality or what should be called augmented perception of time and space. This aesthetic field of investigation has led to a reassessment of representation, one that is not without (1) sharing some of the fundamental concerns of current neuroscientific investigation of mental processes and (2) questioning the image/real continuum principle at the core of recent augmented reality technology research. The article examines media artist Bill Viola's The Passions series (2000)(2001) to contend that new media's original contribution to the practice of hybridity lies in the interaction that it both articulates and encourages with affective sciences, an interaction that redefines representation as an approximation, a facilitator -a projection screen for complex mental processes.

Repertório, 2017

P(AR)ticipate: body of experience/body of work/body as archive and AffeXity are two AR (Augmented Reality) and Screendance works that attempt to capture, amplify and share affect and memory using AR, mobile phones and audience participation. P(AR)ticipate is an immersive, autobiographical, participatory and live installation work comprising: text, analogue hieroglyphs and gestural Screendance videos, tagged to the hieroglyphs, using the AR app Aurasma, within an interaction design. The work explores the porosity between analogue and augmented gestures, personal somatic memories and mediated experiences, of living in an apartheid and democratic South Africa. AffeXity on the other hand, is an interdisciplinary choreographic project examining affect, dance on screen and cities. AffeXity, a play on both 'affect city' and 'a-fixity'. It is a collaborative project drawing together dance, visual imagery, AR and mobile phones, that audiences use for the viewing of choreographies embedded on tags in the city of Copenhagen Denmark. The project now forms part of the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University. This paper describes the process and methodologies of capturing affective choreographies and memory on video, on analogue hieroglyphs and the processes of sharing them within interaction AR designs. It also describes the collaborative processes involved in both projects that attempt to allow audiences with mobile devices, to extrapolate hidden layers of affect and memory using networked mobile technology. These projects may shape choreographic formations that have not yet been explored and "is a specialised and evolving form-where the choreographic language is interrogated not for form or content sake, but in response to the changing stimuli and physical liberties of the technology itself." (KRIEFMAN, 2014). This consequentially liberates the choreographic content and language from more traditional vocabularies, narratives and settings, to poetic ones. Above all, the paper investigates the archiving of affect within a relational and dialogical field, of "unfolding the self into the world, whist enfolding the world within" (BRAIDOTTI, 2013). It explores how we anchor our bodies to the world (GREGG and SEIGWORTH 2010 cited in KOZEL, 2012) and how these "messy encounters become platforms for the transmission of affect (and memory) across bodies that themselves exist across layers of mediatization" (KOZEL, 2013).

This presentation draws on my research in to technological embodiment as part of my PhD studies, which explores a phenomenon called the ‘digital double’ – a manipulable representation of the human body in a variety of performance and new media contexts. My research uses lived experience and autoethnographic writing as a methodology to document and reveal embodied knowledge of the interfaces of body, technology and self when technologically embodied through the digital double. This presentation gives an overview of my research alongside discussion of Me and My Shadow (2012), an interactive telematic and live motion-capture performance installation by sound and media artist Joseph Hyde. Using extracts from autoethnographic writing about my embodied experience of the installation as an audience member, I illustrate the theoretical and embodied bases of my research. My intention is to highlight flaws in current theorisations of the digital double and technological embodiment in this context, which stem from reliance on Merleau-Pontian philosophy of the body as the basis for the research area, and its inherent ‘somatophobia’ (Barbour, 2005). I argue that, through an embodied research methodology and consideration of somatic philosophy and dance scholarship, a more holistic understanding of technological embodiment can be reached.

The International Journal of Screendance

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2017

This paper explores the extension of the body through the technological architecture of interactive art installations. It incorporates and builds upon Don Ihde’s postphenomenological philosophy of technology to argue how tools extend and limit the human body. This work expands upon Ihde’s hypothesis to consider how technologically mediated bodies adapt to and co-create interactive experiences. Through a methodological framework of postphenomenology, this work uses Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1988) and Dennis Del Favero’s immersive artwork Scenario (2011) as case studies. Through application of Ihde and an interview I conducted with Del Favero in 2014, this paper examines how the body is mediated, extended and reduced into his artwork through motion sensing technology. It also considers Ihde’s concept of bodyhood as well as his specific ideas on human-technology relationships, which I argue can be broken down as a way to consider the composition of interactive art. Overall this paper considers the human body’s negotiation with technology as an interface that co-composes experientiality where users become postphenomenologically extended in interactive environments.