The Aesthetics of Liminality: Augmentation as an Art Form - Augmented Reality Art - page 96

Since the age of writing Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, there are a
number of aspects to the human employ of imaging equipment that complicate
the gendered subject/object relation. The first, and perhaps an alternative strategy
to Mulveyan discourse, is that of personalization of the gaze. With the rise of
personal imaging devices, such as iPads and smartphones, the politics of the gaze
is bifurcated between the (relatively) “democratized” operator and the hegemonic
institution of the manufacturer. While I feel it is more germane to consider the role of
the operator in creating the gaze-vector or line of sight of the gaze, the manufacturer
is important as well. For it is the manufacturer that designs, and if one still believes
Bauhaus idea of form and function, it also frames the narrative discourse of the
device itself. And as a male-dominant culture, technology may reify Mulvey's
assertion of a phallocentric gaze, even to AR, but this may shift in that the design
field is more gender equal than Silicon Valley culture. The approval of the design by
the manufacturer reinscribes the agenda of the device, and here I believe Mulvey still
wields much power. However, my first notion of the locus of the operator is where
this discourse diverges from gendered film theory (or at least Mulveyan discourse).
The semiotic space of AR is peculiar in that it is a potentially fluid one,
dependent on any number of factors. Depending on modality, Fiducial, Planar,
Locative, Environmental, or Embodied, the relationship of the viewer's position
to the subject can be quite relative, interactive, or locative. For example, consider
a user in a geolocative installation with, for example, an iPad. Any media is
relative to the viewer's location, point of view, and how the infoset overlays itself
on the “picture plane” of reality as represented by the device's camera and the
AR application. Consider if that media is in itself dynamic if interacted with, the
chain of signification separates from what Duchamp called the merely “retinal”
and becomes haptic as well. The relationship of the viewer, landscape and media
infoset compounds the point of view through multiple points of interest (POIs)
in the landscape, sliding into a Massumian constant state of becoming (Massumi
2002 , 37), as the relation of the viewer and the multiple planes of subject constantly
reconfigure into their new positionality. These are, at least in the case of locational
and interactive AR, the problem of the fluidity of becoming-signification in relation
to the landscape/mise en scene. In the case of the planar mode of augmentation, the
target is often static and the relation is a simple overlay of the augment over the
given recognized signifier. Now that I have at least alluded to the complexities of
the relation to media in augmented spaces, their modalities are subject to study.

5.3 The Structure of the Gesture in Augmented Reality Art:

Fiducial, Planar, Locative/GPS, Environmental
and Embodied/Wearable

Augmented art is actually a catchphrase for at a number of different technologies for
overlaying virtual content on actual scenery since the term's coinage by Caudell and
MizellatBoeingin 1992 (Caudell and Mizell 1992 , 659-669). In this essay, I will