Augmenting Wilderness: Points of Interest in Pre-connected Worlds - Augmented Reality Art - page 220

Fig. 13.9 Reign of gold, Tamiko Thiel, AR (Photo: Nathan Shafer at Out North Contemporary
Art House)
Instead of just targets or geocodes, there is a relative AR, like v1b3's NEWzzzzz ,or
Thiel's Reign of Gold , but it is also enmeshed with the participant who has loaded
the AR layer. Users are able to choose the POIs around them.
When EEG AR was performed as a lab/clinic at FACT in Liverpool, they ran a
room where test subjects would be plugged into a brainwave sensor, which measured
their brainwaves, launching an SQL sequence to create POIs from a preloaded
database.
Creat.AR lets participants turn anything they want into a POI, which will appear
relative to their geo-coordinates. Participants do this by typing in what they would
like to see on the local layer. Then a database connected to that layer, runs an Internet
search, which formats the first image to pop up for the search phrase in the mobile
browser.
These two projects are viscous and nonlocal—two properties of Morton's
hyperobjects. They are viscous in that, “the more you know about a hyperobject,
the more entangled with it you realize you are” (Morton 2010 ). And nonlocal in
that no participant in either project can accurately see the entirety of the work from
where they are. Both works are distributed over the worldwide Wi-Fi ecosystem,
which is closing in on our pre-connected spaces as we draw air. Anywhere there is a
radio signal that can host an Internet connection, AR exists, whether it is manifesting
locally or not.