Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality - Augmented Reality Art - page 164

first from within the dancer's own body and then shared with others through
performance. Augmented reality, in the sense that we describe it here as a means
of integrating physical and digital experiences, reverses this premise since the full
experience is only available to the audience. Shifting Skin effects an even more
complex transaction by conflating the roles of performer and viewer in a scenario in
which viewers, in effect, physically perform the experience of viewing the work for
each other.
Augmented reality experiences lie in the eye and, perhaps more importantly, the
location of the viewer. Augmented reality is not an attempt to create an immersive
experience, but precisely the opposite—a means of activating, simultaneously, mul-
tiple threads of experience across physical and digital domains. Augmented reality
in the context of digital dance performance is generated from technologies that
enable the sharing of embodied experience beyond the limits of the physical pres-
ence of a performer. We see this as one of the key enabling paradigms augmented
reality technologies offers digital artists. A consequence of this affordance, however,
is that embodied experience, whether it is the phenomenological awareness of
skin with all it entails; boundary, surface, implied volume, transgression, marking,
piercing, scarring, embellishing, and/or the not unrelated awareness of physical
movement; surface, volume, mass, gravity, speed, dynamic, physics, affect, contact,
agency, can be simultaneously digital and physical.
Augmented reality is often understood as a digital overlay on a physically 'real'
world. While this might describe the logistics of the technology with some accuracy,
the conceptual affordances of augmented reality technology make possible artworks
that do not position digital and physical worlds in an hierarchical relationship, but
foreground the inevitable integration of multiple sources of experience. Artworks
such as we have described, which articulate this integration via technologies that
embed human movement and, more specifically, dance performance within an
augmented reality framework, provide a demonstration of the inability of digital
dualism to stand up even in relation to what might be considered the most unlikely
candidate for digital distribution - the embodied experience of the human body.
Acknowledgements This research was supported under Australian Research Council's Discovery
Projects funding scheme (project number DP120101695), and by the Deakin Motion.Lab and the
Centre for Intelligent Systems Research, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
References
Atkinson P. Computer. London: Reaktion; 2010.
Auslander P. Liveness; performance in a mediatized culture. Abingdon: Routledge; 1999.
Baugh C. Theatre, performance and technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2005.
Bell D. Why cyberculture? In: London and cyberculture theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna
Haraway. London/New York: Routledge; 2007. p. 1-14.
Bennett A. Shifting skin. AR[t]. 2013;4:26-31.