Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 8.3
Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson (1970). 1,500 ft in Utah, US
8.4.2
Handheld AR Media
These new socially based immersive media platforms provide affordances for new
forms of locative artworks that were not possible before. Here we will discuss how
geo-locative artworks and experiences have been emerging and where there may be
precedents of artists and gamers working collaboratively within large scale environ-
ments (both physical and virtual) that perhaps have laid the cultural landscape for
artists today to explore these new socially immersive AR collaborations.
In the late 1960s Joseph Beuys developed a theory of Social Sculpture that
describes a society in which “Everyone is an artist”. He illustrates the idea that art is
meant to be participatory and can hold the power to transform society. Like Richard
Wagner, Beuys strongly argued for a Gesamtkunstwerk in which society as a whole
was to be regarded as one great work of art. This helped to lay the foundation for
Land Art in the late '60s where the landscape and the work of art were inextricably
linked as seen in Fig.
8.3
documenting Spiral Jetty. Much like contemporary AR
artwork, land art was meant as a protest against the traditional museum and gallery
art worlds in order to bring power back to the community.
Perhaps inspired by the well-known artists who have been transforming the
landscape of our planet for the last 50 years, other lesser known artists have been
transforming the landscapes of virtual environments for the last decade. Perhaps
most famous of these online virtual worlds is Second Life (SL) which has had
over 20 million subscribers. Many SL users pride themselves on the creative design
of space and objects in SL and collaborate in groups on large-scale installations.
Some of these installations mimic spaces from the real world such as in Becoming
