I presented a paper at a conference at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania in May. The conference was called Bodies in Between: Corporality and Visuality from Historical Avant-garde to Social Media. My paper addressed augmented reality projects that ground the participant in her body. Mitch came with me. We had a wonderful time and met many fantastic people. We definitely want to return to Romania.
Video, recorded by Carlton Bright, of a night of performance by Group 6.0. My piece includes the superb Blessed Buckets performing My Buckets Got a Hole in It and God Bless the Child on violin and mandolin. My animation re Jordan Belfort accompanied them but is off to the side. Carlton collages it in at one point. Thanks Carlton. Thanks Buckets. Thanks Jody for inviting me to contribute.
My article, “Place-based, Somatic Augmented Reality as Critical Practice” will be published in the upcoming issue of AR[t] magazine, a publication run by researchers at the AR Lab (Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague), Delft University of Technology, and Leiden University. My article considers place-based work by Teri Rueb (a document of Rueb’s No Places With Names above) and by Manifest AR (particularly Border Memorial by John Craig Freeman and Mark Skwarek, also above). The article also seeks precedents for contemporary somatic AR in works by Jeffrey Shaw (Golden Calf, 1994) and Rebecca Allen (Coexistence, 2001). Another iteration of my research project was published as a short article in Media-N Journal, summer 2013.
I will be hosting a panel discussion as part of Pratt Institute’s PHATT-B, a one-day festival of electronic art. My panel starts at 11:30am and is called: Augmented Reality as Critical Practice. My panelists are Teri Rueb, Sarah Drury, Mark Skwarek, and John Craig Freeman. I am excited. Should be a good day that also features some fantastic people including a keynote by Eva and Franco Mattes (a document of their work above). If interested, please visit the event webpage. Here is the description of my panel. As the capacity of handheld devices has increased, and new augmented reality software has made production more accessible, there has been a corresponding surge of AR projects produced by artists concerned with place and situation. In what ways can these projects refocus attention in virtual and actual public spaces, and provide platforms for expanded public discourse? How do these artists produce within the boundaries of mobile AR, navigating common limitations (small screens, jumpy GPS, device dependency narrowing audience), to create meaningful experiences? This panel starts with the premise that artist-produced AR has the potential to significantly alter our relationship to cultural, political and social phenomena and to other bodies—humans, animals, plants, built structures, landforms and visible and invisible machines. Four artists producing critical place-based AR—Teri Rueb, Sarah Drury, John Craig Freeman and Mark Skwarek—will discuss their concepts, processes and choices with the audience and moderator Meredith Drum.
A few shots taken using our Oyster City app; this is just prior to our July Swing Space Open Studio on Governors Island, NYC. Rachel and I are happy that we were granted this space, March – July 2013, by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. These shots show the Aquaculture site of Oyster City being played/experienced. Oyster City is an iOS app as walking tour and game being produced by Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens in collaboration with Phoenix Toews.
Rachel Stevens and I are testing different augmented reality elements for our Oyster City AR app here on Governor’s Island (NYC) during our Lower Manhattan Cultural Council swing space residency. These are screen shots of our tests. Oyster City is an environmentally focused walking tour and game as augmented reality iOS app. It will be released this summer as a free download on the Mac app store. We hope to move to other platforms soon, droid and windows. We want to expand our audience beyond those with Mac products. Our programming resources are limited, though, and programming for multi-platform takes a good bit of time so this is still on the wish list. If any programmer would like to donate time to the project, we would be thrilled.
Lydia Moyer wrote a smart article about the show she curated at the University of Virginia that included my short science fiction video, The Double. She says: Of particular interest to me was the theme of transmission—the attempts to communicate with some kind of other. Of course transmission is not an uncommon theme in video art, having roots in broadcast or signal transmissions. But these transmissions seemed different, more human–coming out of a deeply held desire to communicate with something outside the self, be it men or plants or the great unknown. Read here.
Rachel Stevens and I pose in our Oyster City studio during the LMCC open studios on Governor’s Island, May 25 and 26. We will have our second and final open studio out there on July 13 and 14, 2013. Come visit.