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the combination of the evidently unreal and the real. It's essence and raison d'être is
that juxtaposition and border between two epistemologically diverse universes, the
live mediation and the virtual augmentation, and that border must be evident. AR
doesn't attempt to embed the viewer in an objective reality, the spectator identifies
with a mediation—the mediation that stands-in for reality.
The cinema screen is a window that lets on to another objective world. The AR
screen is a media screen performing the tricks of which it is able: manipulation,
juxtaposition, combination of live stream images and generated virtual. Augmented
Reality is about combining live mediation with live computational augmentation,
a medium whose essential material is not captured objective reality like cinema,
but electric mediation itself. Media Art, as the media philosopher Lars Qvortrup
has noted, could all be described as ready-mades where instead of R. Mutt's urinal
there is now a computer, a projector, a screen, a camera (Qvortrup
2004
). But AR
art has complicated the ready-made; it is an art of apparatus but not of the objects
themselves, instead the objects are plugged in to each other, broadcasting to each
other and constantly looping in real live time. It is an art of circuits. We are no
longer seeking to grapple with mediation, but have embodied it. We are, instead,
grappling with our relationship to the interface and machine.
So here the question arises, what would be an avant-garde AR?
Augmented Reality art has traded off of its novelty, but as industry establishes
AR experiences for commercial purposes such as Google Glass or the proposition
of AR advertising flashing to our screens and glasses in department stores, AR(t) is
challenged to advance the expressive potential of the electric image. Returning to
our diagram, the repressed elements of computational tracking and video composit-
ing can be mined for expressive potential. This is not, necessarily, 'glitch art'. There
are multiple works, like the AR(t) collective Manifest.AR's inaugural project 'We
ARe MoMA', that emphasize the synthetic nature of the compositing (Fig.
6.5
). In
'We ARe MoMA', Manifest.AR virtually placed a set of 3D graphical art works in
the New York MoMA without permission to be discovered through a smartphone
app (similar to a myriad of other projects from the productive AR(t) collective).
The juxtaposition of virtual and real was the site for the conceptual expression;
this juxtaposition of compositing played with subverting real-world boundaries with
virtual boundaries, in this case the real controls of private property and museum
curation. Early AR(t) works used AR fiducials—barcode-like patterns used for
image tracking and robot-vision. In my own project from 2009, '52CardPsycho',
the spectator is allowed to interact with a deck of custom cards; in an AR 'magic
mirror' screen the cards become the 52 separate shots that make up the shower scene
of Hitchcock's Psycho (Fig.
6.6
). The viewer is able to assemble and dissect the
ancestral cinematic medium creating sculptural objects and 4D spreads of time. For
spectators there was a certain fascination in the fiducial cards. The fiducial pattern
itself serves to reveal the apparatus—an acknowledgment of the code which only the
tracker and scene-generator can read. Fiducials are an image of the AR medium in
which I can watch a computer see and interact with it while understanding that I can
not read what it does. They are, perhaps, an image of our contemporary relationship
with computing at large; the fiducial code reveals the obscurity of the computational
