Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
traveling to all accessible points along the North-south Korean border and erasing
the military structures with AR. This included traveling into North Korea while the
two countries were shooting at each other.
1.7
Cultural Loss
In the age of globalization, the history and culture of the past is often forgotten in
the wake of change. The intrusion of modern pressures polarize ethnic and religious
communities as the forces from the outside world threaten the homogeneity of their
structure. These communities often react by isolating themselves from outsiders
(White
2012
). AR can serve as a historic documentation of these periods of change,
a reminder of people and culture of the past. AR differs from past forms of historic
documentation because it can locate the culture, events, and people of a given time in
the location where they lived in the physical world, rather than in a topic or archive.
In the Mechanics of Place mobile art project, developed by Hana Iverson and Sarah
Drury, participant Kerem Özcan addressed this issue of cultural loss on Bogazkesen
Street in Istanbul, where the tensions of historical change are clearly visible. Istanbul
was once known as a crossroads of the world, where people of different races and
religions lived together in peace. The intermix of different religions and ethnic
populations contributed to the Ottoman Empire's status as one of the world's richest
cultures. A recent surge in Muslim nationalism has lead to the shunning of outsiders
and their cultures. Groups outside the Muslim community are being pushed out
and their presence erased. Özcan repopulated the Istanbul street with fictionalized
residents - people of varying cultural backgrounds, who once made Istanbul the
“melting pot” of the world.
1.8
Augmented Reality and Censorship
In 2011 Turkey banned 138 words from Turkish Internet domains. Words including
“homemade,” “hot,” “nubile,” “free” and “teen” were part of the censorship cam-
paign against anything insulting to Turkishness and political extremism (Senerdem
2011
). Some saw this as part of a crackdown and tightening of religious intolerance
by the Turkish government. Petek Kizilelma and Hana Iverson took on Turkey's
'forbidden words list' with an AR work that used the words as graffiti in the streets
of Istanbul.
Tamiko Thiel's work “Shades of Absence: Governing Bodies” addresses cen-
sorship by government officials in the art world. Thiel puts golden silhouettes of
censored artists inside the walls of the Corcoran Gallery of Art - including Robert
Mapplethorpe, whose planned 1989 show The Perfect Moment was cancelled by the
museum's director in a preemptive act of self-censorship. Conservative members of
Congress had called Mapplethorpe's work “obscene.” (Katz
2009
)
