Augmented Interventions: Re-defining Urban Interventions with AR and Open Data - Augmented Reality Art - page 88

Fig. 4.4 NAMA -Rama walk in Dublin's docklands

Channel Four News TV crews. 10 NAMAland is essentially a walking project, albeit
facilitated through AR technology, it is necessary to deploy it on the street for it
to operate at all. The guided walks, through careful selection of routes, were able
to maximise this impact by proceeding through areas of the highest concentration
of landmark buildings and, as participatory events, functioned as walking forums
facilitating participants in discussing the issues represented by NAMA and its
property portfolio. In this way the project connected the abstractness of the dataset
to the space of the city through a narrative contextualisation which emanating both
from the framing of the walks supplied by the artist but in a more significant
way from the engagement of the participants. NAMA represents a complex system
of abstract financial dealings, transactions which have become so disconnected
from everyday understanding but yet have significant and very real consequences.
Whereas the narrative of NAMA was the narrative of the (now defunct) property
market, international finance and IMF bailouts, NAMAland reconnects this to
real spaces exposing their interconnectedness and the real consequences on the
space of the city and in the lives of its inhabitants. The interventions which
NAMAland facilitated are thus framed and enabled though the production of a hybrid
space which deploys augmented reality and data overlays to re-imagine the urban
intervention as the generation of data rich hybrid spaces which can materialise and
dissipate with the ebb and flow of the chosen dataset.

10 See walkspace.org/namaland/news.html for details of these events