The Aesthetics of Liminality: Augmentation as an Art Form - Augmented Reality Art - page 107

Fig. 5.12 Into the Wild/Virtual Kenai (Patrick Lichty 2014b )

Fairey had recently repainted. In the case of Ryan McGinness (the most frequently
reproduced of the set), the colorful Haring/Leger-like landscape of bodies formed a
frame, and jets of color spew out of the side of the building. Such a simple gesture
as the McGinness mural to the explosive Driskill Hotel takeover at SxSW 2013
illustrates the environmentally transformative quality of AR when taken to scale.
Although smaller, the 5 by 21 foot Jacquard-woven tapestry Into the Wild/Virtual
Kenai is a panoramic composite of online and actual photography taken by this
author from a 2009 photographic project in Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula and
Adak Island. The piece refers to instruments of power such as the Bayeux Tapestry ,
which depicts the Battle of Hastings, and the culturally transformative nature of the
Jacquard Loom at the turn of the nineteenth century much in the way Globalization
and mechanization do today. The 5-by-21 foot size is appropriate for depiction of
the grandeur of the Alaskan landscape. For augment tracking, it uses QR Codes as
web links or fiducial markers, and features like bird flocks and sunlit highlights
as recognizable features. The content (doubly accessible in the case of the QR
Code) refers to the artist's experience of the Alaskan environmental embarrassment
of riches while forces such as oil and mineral industries and global worming
encroach this remote part of the world. Into the Wild/Virtual Kenai, in its own way,
depicts another form of conquest that is the Enlightenment-era notion of the human
subjugation of nature, currently termed as the Anthropocene Age (Crutzen and
Stoermer 2000 , 18). In this way, this work frames itself in a historical context while
still forming a critical stance. But other applications root themselves even deeper in
history, and reveal exciting potentials for the illustrative power of environmentally-
based AR.
Nathan Shafer's Exit Glacier Terminus AR shown in Fig. 5.13 , and Intracom's
(Greece) Archeoguide illustrated by Fig. 5.14 , reveal two distinct histories, one of
Classical Greece, and the other the retreating terminus of the Exit Glacier on the
Alaskan Kenai Peninsula. Exit Glacier, created for interpretive rangers with the
Kenai Peninsula National Park, is a unique application that specifically recognizes
the terrain from its own database, as there is little data connectivity at the site, and
had to use its own tenuous Wi-Fi transceiver. Exit Glacier is also unique in that it
is one of only two walk-up glaciers, and the AR application will show five distinct
reconstructions of the glacier face from 1978 to 2013. The challenge connectivity