Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality - Augmented Reality Art - page 153

reality limits both the opportunities involved and our understanding of work that is
made in these new technological spaces.
This chapter undertakes such an examination of augmented reality, using exam-
ples of recent investigation at the Deakin Motion.Lab as a way of mapping the forms
in which technology has enabled conceptual shifts in both developing and finished
art works. This is, of necessity, a somewhat retrospective and iterative process.
We work from a practice-led perspective in which creation and conception occur
together and in ways that are not necessarily immediately apparent in the process
of making work. Conceptual shifts happen through the process of making, and it is
only retrospectively that it is possible (and then imperfectly) to begin to synthesize
the strands of thought and work in ways that create a coherent whole. We aim, in
this chapter, to circle in on some of the paradigms made possible by augmented
reality in creative practice through a dual analysis of the affordances, to use James
Gibson's ( 1986 : 127-128) term, we associate with augmented reality processes and
of the performative paradigms we are able to enact in our artworks.

9.2 Computational and Physical Spaces: A Digital Dualism?

There was a time when the conceptual space created by computers and digital
technology was limited to an elite. Personal computers emerged in the 1970s
(Atkinson 2010 : 80-90). The internet was opened beyond the military and academic
spheres in the mid nineties (Thomas and Wyatt 1999 : 683). Until quite recently,
computers were something that one sat down to at a desk. There was a distinct
separation between engagement and disengagement from the technology that was
encapsulated in the notion of being 'online' or 'offline.'
Whilst cyberpunk author William Gibson is credited with coining and popularis-
ing the concept of cyberspace as an immersive and separate reality in the 1980s (Bell
2007 : 2), since 2010, Gibson has noted the 'eversion' of the relationship between
cyberspace and the physical world. Instead of sitting at a screen and disengaging
from one's body into cyberspace, the digital world now overlays and engulfs the
physical. Gibson's ( 2007 ) novel Spook Country created a compelling image of
the digital that overlays the physical. In a 2010 interview with BBC technology
correspondent Mark Ward, Gibson said “Cyberspace is colonising what we used to
think of as the real world I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the

distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as
simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us” (Ward
2010 ).
Since the introduction of internet-enabled smart phones, accelerated with the
introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (Goggin 2012 : 11) the distinction between
digital and physical space has rapidly converged. However, at this point in time, the
conceptual models used to discuss and explore this technical/cultural shift are still in
the process of recalibrating. What sociologist Nathan Jurgenson describes as 'digital
dualism' is the tendency to conceive of the 'digital' and 'physical' as separate and

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