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both in content due to their performativity, and in physical location of experience
due to their mediation. This has led to the perception of AR art as being subversive
or independent of curatorial practice.
However, these qualities demonstrate not so much a removal of curatorial bound-
aries, as a translocation of them from the physical to the digital. The art installation
occurs not in the gallery, but on the hard drive of mobile devices. In this way AR
artworks align themselves more perhaps with movements like net.art, where one
must look to the loading screen as the gateway to the gallery, a space which - while
mutable and infinitely configurable - is still proscriptive. AR may allow the artist
to set many more of the work's boundaries than in more traditional media, but even
that freedom is still subject to the affordances of the software composing the work.
7.2
Borders of Experience
Engagement of the fourth wall occurs when an observed artwork changes or speaks
directly to the audience. Many new media interactive artworks already challenge
traditional notions of the fourth wall in that the viewer's participation is an integral
part of the performativity of the piece. Artworks for their part are concerned with
perlocutionary acts, which is to say acts described from the vantage point of their
affect on the viewer: scaring, angering, beguiling. Specifically, perlocutionary is
also a useful term in describing the actions required of the piece from its viewers -
and the performances the pieces in turn respond with - and how this process creates
an emotional affect in the viewer. The perlocutionary qualities of such new media
pieces create a feedback loop of continual engagement that is only broken when the
participant has exhausted the piece's ability to perform, or the engagement offered
cannot compete with their diminished attention span. Dourish explored this in his
investigation of 'engaged interaction' (Dourish
2001
).
But how is this different from experiencing a non-interactive piece of artwork?
While a painting or sculpture may seem different to a viewer who steps closer or
spends longer with the piece, the critical point is that the artwork asks nothing
from them in terms of embodied action. All demands are perceptual, ones they can
comfortably respond to from their position behind the passive “fourth wall”. In this
method too one could consider a non-interactive work conceptually complete when
sitting in a gallery space unobserved. Interactive works, however, have a critical
component missing that robs them of their expressive voice when they are sitting
unengaged within an exhibition space.
AR complicates this even further by adding intermediary devices into the
interpretive and experiential mix. Augmented reality artworks provide a way in
which the fourth wall of passive viewing is enriched by, at the most basic level,
technology which is appended to the senses of the viewer. The “performances”
or “texts” of the piece are first mediated through a device, usually a video feed
computationally modified and then displayed. This can take the form of a computer
