Spatial Narratives in Art - Augmented Reality Art - page 281

Fig. 16.13 A screen shot of We Need Something , 2012, Will Pappenheimer, location-based
augmented reality iPhone screenshot, copyright Will Pappenheimer. Description: This work is
located over Queens, NY during the manifestation days 'Occupy Wall Street' in 2012
given by a series of individual works and by continuous links to real and virtual
situations. The conclusions are given by the account pieced together by artistic
works that make use of those elements that characterize reality as the continuous
flow of states that we perceive as changes in life and in the space we live in. The
works are individual, shifting, subjective accounts, more from the point of view of
an art world outsider than from an insider. This can be seen in Will Peppenheimer's
Skywrite AR: We Need Something, which appeared virtually over Queens in New
York throughout the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2012 (Fig. 16.13 ).
The game of claiming to be outside any official system or establishment is
itself a strategy for earning oneself a role as spokesperson of dissent, while it
is also interesting as an expression of artistic freedom. The framework of the
exhibitions described is shaped by the continuous friction between the individualism
of the artists and the institutional nature of the events they target. It all turns on
an ambiguous division that is technically ironclad as it overlaps the problem of
perpetual newness that augmented reality and the New Aesthetic express. Changes
in public space have become manifest in the augmented power of biopolitics, in
the critical analysis of ubiquitous computing, in the question of surveillance versus
inverse surveillance, in freedom of speech, in the permeability of boundaries, in
locative media, in developments in the political and social environment, in the
Panopticon, in interventionism in the art system (such as the Venice Biennale and
MoMA invasions), in issues of democracy and privacy, in the tracking and profiling
of data flows underpinning the growth of a database culture. All these changes
have contributed to the construction of a new digital identity—but is it an identity