I visited the fatastic Moderna Museet in Stockholm recently, they had an exhibit of the works of Ed Ruscha that got me thinking. I’ve been thinking a lot about the creative possibilities of mixed reality lately - I’m getting fatigued by “floaticons” on camera views, and I think we’re missing out on “magic” part of the magic lens metaphor.
A couple of his works struck me as ripe for straight-ahead adaptation. In many cases these pieces would work even with poor position and orientation estimates - for instance I’d rather like to leave text like this, framed carefully at a beautiful location, maybe programmed only to appear when there’s a sunrise or sunset, or if the light temperature through the lens is just so.
I also really liked the ambiguity of the outlines on this work, and think it would be very powerful if it randomly appeared at beaches on overcast evenings, barely perceptable against the background.
There’s also something vaguely unsettling about the cloudiness of these kinds of scenes. It wouldn’t be a very difficult video-effect to pull off in real-time, and the combination of the unsettling background and the stark exclamatory text is powerful. You can imagine transitioning from a normal view to this kind of representation with a textual description of the death-toll from the witch trials when visiting Salem, for instance.
Ok, maybe that’s more of a visualisation than an art piece, but there are all kinds of video-editing tricks we could use to enhance the impact of AR pieces if we progress beyond literal representation.
