Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.2
The Gaze, the Overlay and the Retinal
In the creation and 'performance' of AR works, there are often two actions in
place, and those are of gaze and gesture/positionality. The reason why I separate the
two, although related, is that in the five modalities/gestures that I wish to discuss
(Fiducial, Planar, Locative, Environmental, and Embodied), each has different
relationships between the user, the augment, and the environment. That is, in the
experiencing/performance of AR, there is placement of one or many elements
between the eye and the recognized target, and the gaze of the agent in experiencing
the piece. I will refer to the AR media in question as a 'piece' or 'installation',
as the bulk of this discussion has to do with art, but some exceptional commercial
examples will be included. In
The Translation of Virtual Art,
I defined the gestural
lines of intent, or 'vectoral gestures' as being a line of flight between the origin of
the work and the site of the intended audience. These consisted of four modalities,
being wholly in the physical or virtual, or gesturing from one to the other (or a
combination). AR is a different set of configurations.
The difference inherent in AR from VR is that while there is virtual content, that
content is overlaid upon a visual representation of the physical. It would be simple to
theorize an intermediate plane of representation between the viewer and the target as
n the case of the Planar modality, but unfortunately, AR is not that straightforward.
Depending on said modality, there could be a space-matrix of locative or interactive
media, a space imposed on a marker, as well as one or more spatial planes between
the viewer and the target (as in print, which I discuss as the Fiducial and Planar).
AR consists of a space of positional overlays, whether locative or recognized, and
a performative gestural gaze, especially in the case of goggles or handheld/tablet
works, as we will observe in Darf Design's
Hermaton
. In addition, I would like to
put forth a proposition regarding Duchamp's idea of the 'retinal' and an argument
for his
Fountain being
a predecessor to augmented art in 1917 with his addition of
the signature (Craft
2012
, 202). However, this comes into play only after considering
notions of the gaze and of what I will call overlay-space. But when aiming a camera
of any sort, the argument of the “gaze” emerges in critical discourse.
In order to address the notion of lensed or gestural view (and perhaps I
combine these two together a little casually, they are linked in the case of AR),
Laura Mulvey's seminal essay,
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
(Mulvey
2004
, 837-849) comes to mind
.
In it, she established the concept of the all-
objectifying 'male gaze' that gendered the vector of the film lens as one between the
subject (female) and objectifier (male). However, with the pervasiveness of personal
imaging through mobile devices, Queer Theory and other theoretical frameworks
have complicated this discourse. It is for this reason that I feel that as the gaze
has been democratized, but manufactured by hegemony, and the 'Queering' of
Augmented space deserves its own essay. As such, I feel it is beyond the scope
of this humble musing. However, I will touch on this momentarily as an invitation
for further discussion.
