Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality - Augmented Reality Art - page 152

Chapter 9
Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality

Kim Vincs, Alison Bennett, John McCormick, Jordan Beth Vincent,
and Stephanie Hutchison

9.1 Introduction

Embedded throughout the work of media theorist Vilem Flusser is the observation
that technologies create paradigms (Flusser 1988 , 2011: 3-4). He argues that writing
created linear historical consciousness, technical images such as photography cre-
ated scanning, or thinking in two-dimensional planes, and, he predicted, computers
would facilitate complex networked or 'structural' thinking. Flusser goes beyond
Marshall McLuhan's 1964 dictum that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan
2013 : 19) to assert that new media make new kinds of messages possible, because
new technologies suggest and support new conceptual structures which, in turn,
influence how ideas are formed and what kinds of ideas can be formed. 1
The emergence of augmented reality then, necessitates a consideration of the new
theoretical and conceptual implications this technology enables. This is not to say
that augmented reality must create new ways of thinking and making. It is possible
(and not always a bad thing) to simply recreate existing conceptual and artistic
paradigms using a new technology. However, to fail to consider how potential
conceptual and artistic shifts are made in relation to technologies such as augmented

1 Indeed, Flusser went so far as to say that “

::: McLuhan ::: proposes an attitude towards the

image that I consider fascistoid” (Flusser 1988 : 8.50).