Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
The Aesthetics of Liminality: Augmentation
as an Art Form
Patrick Lichty
5.1
Introduction
Over the past 15 years to its emergence in the 2010s as an art medium, Augmented
Reality has developed as a number of evidential sites. As an extension of virtual
media, it merges real-time pattern recognition with goggles, finally realizing
William Gibson's sci-fi fantasy, or handheld devices. This creates a welding of a
form of real-time video and virtual reality, or an optically registered simulation
overlaid upon an actual spatial environment. Commercial applications have been
numerous, including entertainment, like the Esquire Augmented Reality issue, sales
in terms of Costco (an American big-box retailer) in their latest AR-enhanced in-
store magazine, to navigation such as Oakley's AR-equipped ski goggles. And even
though AR-based works can be traced back into the late 1990s, much of this work
required at least an intermediate understanding of coding and tethered imaging
equipment from webcams to goggles. It is not until the advent of marker-based
AR possessing lower entries to usage, as well as geolocational AR-based media
through handheld devices and tablets that Augmented Reality as an art medium
would begin to propagate. While one can make arguments that much AR-based art
is a convergence between handheld device art and Virtual Reality, there are gestures
that are specific to Augmented Reality that allow for its specificity as a genre. In this
examination, we will look at some historical examples of AR, and critical issues of
the AR-based gesture, such as compounding of the gaze, problematizing the retinal,
and the representational issues of informatics overlays. This also generates four
gestural vectors analogous to those defined in
The Translation of Virtual Art
(Lichty
2014a
, 445), which we will examine through case studies. Through these studies, it
is hoped that a deeper understanding of an augmented semiotics can be achieved.
