Information Technology Reference
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Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, someone moves adjacent to my shoulder. With
a slight swivel of my face, a warm breath pulses against my cheek. Turning
completely, he comes into view. His breath reaches into my mouth like an ominous
shadow rolling across a plain. Simultaneously, his voice is a soft growl and a matter
of fact Indiana-Southern style whisper: “You're scaring people.”
Alongside marking the scene with AR is now a newfound sense of trouble.
To be certain that trouble is accompanied with alarm, the man repeats himself.
Taking stock of the situation in the People's Park, a place where transients come
to linger during the day, I see the world continues to pass by. Now someone-
namely me-from that world passes into the park, space invades alongside AR art
and brandishes a computer device in the air. Clearly such swashbuckling antics are
not appreciated. Perhaps it is the computer that concerns them: an object waving
around, a screen exploring the environment and a stranger creating an unknown
quiddity. The people in People's Park feel screened. I am a surveyor that is being
subject to surveillance.
We look straight ahead, nearly nose to nose, eyes in essence touching. His
sunburned skin, long hair and military garb appears war town and weather beaten.
He stands not much taller and he means business. He repeats himself, “You're
scaring people.” I do not move. My body is still as my mind registers standing
close to this stranger. Our locked gaze continues, I reply softly, “I'm not scaring'
anyone. I'm looking for my heart.” Immediately his body relaxes, he withdraws
ever so slightly, makes a bow and returns to me. Moving in close, he replies, “Well,
I'm looking for my heart too.” We began to have a consensual hallucination in
a conversation of soul quest, symbolic language and sententious poetry. We each
profess a type of pronunciamento regarding hearts. Two disparate sensibilities dove-
tailing around one another through conversation and confrontation and summing up
with a profound sense of moment and place. It helps to further understand crazy.
Contemporaneously, the discourse makes perfect sense and broken nonsense but
ends in mutual satisfaction. It ends as if there exists a private acquiescence to
recognize a heart when it is presented.
17.4
Subversive Confrontation
The discovery of AR artwork in a People's Park situates the visitor not only in a
location but within a social structure that is transforming with both particular and
random circumstances. The community transubstantiates the public area creating an
ever changing dynamic established by a flow of situations. The AR experience is
situated not for this marginalized group of people but those who travel there in
order to recognize the affordances of the computer graphics as presence, action
and relationships intrinsic to the reconfiguration of reality by the introduction of
virtuality. Ascott states that “virtual reality corrupts and absolute reality corrupts
absolutely, whenever the constraints and limitation of its construction are preor-
dained, predefined or pre-set.” The search for AR art is a search for the definition
