I’m always keeping an eye out for pieces that either might already be AR, or would translate very well into AR. Two artists caught my eye recently.
The first is illustrator and artist Anna Emelia, whose work is very cosy and intimate which might translate well into the “doll house” perception of desktop hand-held AR for instance. She recently submitted this image on her blog, which I like very much.
The second is German street artist Tasso. Below is just one of many pieces he has that might translate very well into AR. How terrifying, for instance, might this one be, with a bit of interactivity and some sound:
I’m plugging away at a City Scene demo right now, but I’d rather throw it all away and start figuring out how to make AR art with a similar feeling to that shown: intimate, precisely located, and cute. Definitely leaving some physical props in there.
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.
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.
Jonsi is playing Flow Festival here in Helsinki later in the summer - I’m really excited to see him, and I fervently hope they bring the whole set shown here. There’s lots of talk about “AR experiences” nowadays, and this is a first step. It’s very exciting to have artists making commercial art with AR: the technology is maturing into a useful medium. They clearly had wonderful intention: they say “magical”, “exciting”, “hybrid”, “theatrical”, “woven into the fabric of the show”, “the whole stage is a canvas” - these are the artistic strengths of AR - and they seem to have delivered - the execution looks stunning.
Obviously this is all projective but, for me, this is exactly what an AR experience should be like - situated, spatial, playful, narrative. This is a great start, and mobile or wearable AR will only be even more participative, and more engaging. Here’s to more AR art!
