You can't force AR

March 8, 2011

A bunch of artists gathered together under the “AR art manifesto” have staged a couple of AR “happenings” now, in various US sites. I find their work very interesting, but also quite misguided. I’ll declare my biases upfront: the sort of meaningless postmodern nonsense theses of the manifesto rub me the wrong way (I half hope it’s another Sokal affair), so that may have a hand in my negativity.

Most (all?) of their exploits seem to involve “sticking it to the man” by placing AR content somewhere supposedly illicit: the New York MoMA, the Venice Biennial, and most recently, the White House, all using Layar. Their reasoning is AR is tied to location, and they can use it to add content to these places without any approval of the owners of the physical space. I have two problems with this premise.

The first is, AR is (especially now, and probably forever) an inherently opt-in technology. You can place as many AR art pieces as you like in the lobby of MoMA, but unless a) people have explicitly tuned to the right layer and b) they actually care to look at what you’ve placed, it really, really doesn’t matter. There’s too much emphasis on the significance of the placement, which is trivial in this medium, and not enough emphasis on creating good AR art, which is hard.

The second problem is, well, it’s lame - like “AR graffiti” lame. You want to make graffiti art? Locate your metaphorical balls and go and make graffiti art: transcend some actual norms and/or laws. Making polite, sterile, digital, opt-in art and then presenting it as a subversive “infiltration” just doesn’t cut it.

Finally I think it’s the wrong way round: rather than try injecting AR pieces into popular venues, I’d like to see someone focus on AR pieces so compelling that people are willing to travel to see them. That would be revolutionary.

5:20pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnNhKy3Tw9Ow
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