Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality - Augmented Reality Art - page 161

Fig. 9.4 'Recognition' 2013 by John McCormick

rather than simply a specific form of technology. Augmented reality is widely
accepted as a technology based on recognition of specific images, which trigger
pre-defined digital imagery. However, this definition only explains one part of the
works. Shifting Skin , with its performative integration of viewers through the need
to physically position and re-position the iPad in relation to the photographs, and its
integration of the notion of skin through the images themselves and the movement
of those images over an expanded, stretched and distorted topology, embeds the
physicality of skin and scarring across physical and digital domains. The Crack
Up integrates real-time physical performance with the 'performance' of a digital
'skin' that also references, through generating needle-like spikes projected out of
the screen in 3D, the origin of the tattoo images. Recognition takes these elements
and embeds an AI performer, trained by motion capture data from a human dancer,
within this scenario so that the digital system performs in a very real sense alongside
and in dialogue with a human performer.

9.4 Location Is Everything

Digital entities in performance demand a kind of “collective hallucination,” to
borrow William Gibson's fictional description of a system that enables direct
interface between mind and data (Rey 2012 ). Physical and digital 'dancers' must
be simultaneously perceived as part of conceptual whole. Moreover, digital dance