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In both interventions the curatorial questions were the same: How can we go
beyond each city's glorious past to address its contemporary concerns and the reality
of life in the city today? What role does the art biennial play in the political and
cultural life of each city? Can we use the interventions to question the biennial
system itself, and the art world's use of that system to define and establish artistic
value?
2.2
Challenging and Exploiting the Primacy of Site
The Manifest.AR artist group originally formed around an intervention into the
United States' most iconic contemporary art space: the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek realized that the institutional walls of
the white cube were no longer solid, and organized a guerilla exhibit of augmented
reality artworks inside the walls of MoMA.
1
Since time immemorial location has been used to consecrate objects and people.
The religious and power centers of the world maintain sacred spaces where only
the chosen elect are allowed to enter. In the art world too, access to a location - a
gallery, a museum or other curatorially closed space - is tightly controlled to confer
value and thus, via this exclusivity, to canonize the works shown there as “high art.”
What does it mean however to control physical space when in geolocated virtual
space anyone can place whatever they want? (Aceti
2008
). Augmented reality artists
require no permission from government or artistic authorities to place their works
at a specific site. They merely need know the GPS coordinates of the location -
and unlike Street Art or other physical art interventions, the infiltrated institutions
cannot remove the works, which remain on site as long as the artist wishes.
Technically, it is a trivial difference in GPS coordinates that moves a virtual
object from a public space such as Central Park to the curatorially closed space
inside the sacred walls of MoMA. As long as curators are gatekeepers for locations
of high art, location still confers value - and placing AR works in such a location,
even or especially if put there by the artists themselves in subversion of this control,
endows the works with the aura of objects canonized by that location.
The epiphany of augmented reality, however, is that although the artworks are
virtual, their presence at the site is “real”: “actually existing as a thing or occurring
in fact; not imagined or supposed” (Oxford English Dictionary
2013
)-andis
reproducible by anyone who views the artwork at that site. In this “consensual
1
In October 2010 Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek organized the AR intervention “We AR in
MoMA” (Veenhof
2010
) for the Conflux Festival of Psychogeography (Conflux Festival
2010
).
Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling blogged the intervention on WIRED (Sterling
2010
), MoMA
tweeted “Nice, looks like we're havin an 'uninvited' AR exhibition tomorrow!” (Museum of
Modern Art
2010
), and later in an interview with the New York Times the director of digital media
welcomed our engagement with her museum (Fidel
2010
).
