Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Regardless of when and where the anti-tradition emerged, its various practices
and applications have usually aligned with revolutionary or countercultural political
movements of the day—for example, members of the Situationist International were
in the Latin Quarter during the 1968 riots in Paris and members of the Provo Group
hijacked a balcony in the Vatican delivering an anti-religious Easter sermon before
they were arrested. What is important to note is how works from the anti-tradition
are quintessentially
of the time,
with each socially useful or relevant form these
artists took to counter the dubious cultural dialectics of their time. As Gregory
Sholette wrote, “If socially useful art is ultimately determined by the society it
serves, the artist as tool maker must, by necessity, look to the public sphere, and
not to the realm of art, for the logic of her work” (Sholette et al.
2004
).
Apart from the anti-tradition, AR art has ancestors in Earth art and concep-
tualism; roots in Fluxus, punk rock, the Situationist International, Fin-de-siècle
literature, cyberpunk and 1990s style Interventionism. It cut its teeth with the
twenty-first century's international Occupy movements. The Manifest.AR mani-
festo, from early 2011, posits that AR artists “create subliminal, aesthetic and
political AR provocations, triggering Techno-Disturbances in the substratosphere of
Online and Offline Experiences
:::
Augmented reality is a new Form of Art, but it
is Anti-Art
It is a Relational Conceptual art that Self-Actualizes” (Manifest.AR
2011
). Since its inception, Manifest.AR has consistently produced collaborative
projects from the public sphere, which have integrated with social movements and
revolutions across the globe.
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13.6
Usage
When AR browsers became available as mobile applications, it was a
memetic
shift
in the usage of AR, from the preconscious imaginings in sci-fi novels with headsets
and cyberpunks—to the one from quotidian existence where tourists hold up mobile
phones in shopping arcades. Initially, the works of art produced inside of this new
usage of AR seemed like they would be a combination of locative media and digital
sculpture, which by and large they are, but it has been adapting to the common usage
in society. Gibson described the locative artist as “annotating every centimeter of a
place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices
” (Gibson
2007
). The
'device' referred to is the artist's mobile phone; which is not the preferred method
for viewing 'locative media' in
Spook Country
(VR headsets are), the artist's mobile
phone was a second best—an ad hoc example, put together to illustrate the important
locative work the fictional artist made for VR helmets.
Just because an object has certain properties or features, does not preclude that
they will be used, or used in the way they were intended. As Sheller notes, “Unlike
commercial applications, artists often draw on more disruptive and critical traditions
that seek to defamiliarize the familiar, or to heighten our sensual awareness of
location, or to offer new forms of place making and public engagement” (Sheller
2013
). With the myriad of commercially available AR glasses, on the verge of
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