Augmenting Wilderness: Points of Interest in Pre-connected Worlds - Augmented Reality Art - page 207

13.2 AR, OOO

Augmenting wilderness is a practice in augmented reality art making—the process
of enmeshing digital objects with pre-connected worlds. Pre-connection references
the absence of wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) within an ecosystem or community, but not
the effects of it, which are evident in its local manifestations and are ubiquitous in
the augmented object's realm of attraction. Pre-connection precludes the idea that
eventually the entire world will be universally connected to the Internet, so it is a
temporal descriptor, albeit based on a very optimistic prediction about the future
of technological ubiquity. Pre-connection is going to be a contemporary, temporal
condition of some areas on the planet, where either a lack of human population
or environmental factors, keep the space signal from integrating with the local
media ecosystem via ambient radio waves (Wi-Fi). Radio waves, satellite signals
and space weather are part of the nonlocal intermedia landscape of human mobility
from global to interplanetary, but presently are Anakin to the social wilderness ,a
wilderness completely outside of human construct or perception.
Theuseoftheterm wilderness in relation to AR adopts Levi Bryant's wilderness
onticology , “(it) should not be conceived as the absence of humans, but rather in
terms of a flat plane of being where humans are among beings without any unilateral,
overdetermining role

humans dwell in wilderness without the wilderness being
reduced to a correlate of thought,” (Bryant 2011 ) looking at the wilderness as
a multiplicitous 'difference engine', in the context of object-oriented ontology
(OOO), an aesthetic philosophy of being that takes the perceived reality of objects
out of Kant's Copernican Revolution , which predicates the existence of objects on
the human-world correlate of them (Kant 1781 ). Defining wilderness, for the sake
of augmented reality as an artistic practice, is more a discussion than definition, as
Oeschlaeger notes, “the issue involves the theorie upon which praxis will rest—
the idea of wilderness itself. Whatever this idea, the conceptual difference will be
reflected in practice” (Oeschlaeger 1991 ).
Certain theoretical aspects of augmented reality artistic collectivism are ecolog-
ically parallel to OOO, especially the metaphysical nature of the AR 'art-object',
which focuses “on the informational relationship between object and human viewer,
or the political and economical context surrounding the artwork's reception”
(Jackson 2011 ). OOO emerged at around the same time as mobile AR collectivism
(2009-2010), so it is no surprise that there are similarities due to their temporal
proximity: there are issues of critical reception for both groups because of their
incorporation of non-traditional platforms like social networks and blogging—both
groups are also academically suspect in many circles, (OOO is unconcerned with
the Analytic vs. Continental beef, and AR is equally unconcerned with Modernism
vs. Post-Modernism).
Early critical issues concerning augmented reality as an emergent art form are
described as the “antiquated VR pipe dreams” via the new media blog, Rhizome.org,
taken from fictional depictions of AR and the use of the 'web browser' as an artistic
metaphor. The 'VR pipe dreams', which William Gibson fictionalized in his 2007

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