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However, we see here that while people interact with the topic by turning the pages,
they are not performatively engaged as co-producers of the piece. The singularity of
its experience is mirrored in the singular experience of traditional artwork exhibited
in a gallery or museum. Furthermore, the custom hardware necessary for its display
means that this piece is tied to the place of its exhibition.
Not all augmented reality artworks are constrained through the physical embod-
iment of piece-specific hardware, however. One of the sub-genres of augmented
artworks that takes advantage of those proclivities are locative literature pieces, such
as those authored by StoryTrek software, which use smartphones as their artistic
substrate.
In one such piece, entitled
Crisis 22
, viewers experience a story spatially, tied in
physical location to a street in Ottawa. Viewers use a mobile device as a prosthesis
for the communication of narrative, and exhibit agency in the story through an
exploratory framework: re-tracing their steps reveals backstory, while heeling off
into an alleyway provokes narrative digression (Greenspan
2011
). In this way the
piece leverages augmented reality for an artistic experience that is closely tied to
a specific place with precise boundaries, yet whose borders of experience are not
clearly defined to the participant. Additionally, nothing more is being asked of the
participant other than the exploration of physical space to yield narrative. They
change nothing in the work for others through their interactions. They have agency
only as far as their own experience and interpretation of the work goes - much like
a viewer of a non-interactive work in a gallery. The key point of interest in pieces
like
Crisis 22
is its engaging use of specific space, which at once seems delineated,
yet open to ambiguity.
Another example of such work is
Frontera de los Muertos
(Freeman
2013
), an
AR piece that re-contextualizes the space of the US/Mexico border in Arizona.
Freeman uses augmented reality to overlay effigies of human skeletons on locations
where immigrants died in the process of attempting to cross into the US. Again,
it is enough with this piece that it engages in that re-contextualization, and the
interactivity is restrained to perlocutionary acts of driving to the space, downloading
the app, and starting up the channel in Junaio. In the sense of a curated space, the
power of this piece derives directly from its location, and as such it would lose its
critical context if the asset locations were moved. Therefore, while it partakes of
very different parameters from traditional curation, it is still nonetheless a piece
with explicit specifications.
7.3
Art Installation
Intrinsic to the unbound physical locativity unique to particular forms of AR
is the concept of active perceptual re-contextualization, which is accomplished
through viewer interaction. For example, in works such as Manifest.AR's gallery
interventions (Veenhof and Skwarek
2010
) or Phoenix Toews' sculptural app Pyrite
