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with the site to experience it - an act which engages the kinesthetic sense of the
viewer's body and thus situates the viewer and the act of viewing in the physical
experience of that site.
Our interventions into art spaces and events are thus instigated by the visual,
cultural and physical facets of experience that the site provides for the artwork
as canvas and as context, with an express interest in the dialogues - in the art
world and beyond - that engage the site. Many of our works dialogue directly with
the other “official” artworks at a venue, and inevitably also with the theme and
concept of the exhibition as defined by the curator. Many artists act on and react to
contemporary events and discourses, of course, but the ability of augmented reality
to geolocate artworks at the site of those discourses increases the potency of their
visual argument.
3
In a time when many question the relevance of galleries, museums
and biennials as venues for art, we save the gated communities of the art world from
irrelevance by bringing a new form of dialogue into their institutions.
2.4
Manifest.AR Venice Biennale Intervention Themes
and Concerns
At the 2011 Venice Biennale we wished to reflect not on Venice's past glory, but on
its current situation: wrestling with climate change, overrun by tourists and street
vendors, fighting to keep its art biennial relevant in an era in which its national
pavilions stand in direct contrast to the globalized, itinerant world of contemporary
art, whose artists live and work in multiple systems of cultural reference. The
national pavilions that dominate the Venice Biennale are a reflection of its origins
at the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of the nation-state with a presumed
monolithic ethnic or cultural identity. At the very latest since the end of the Cold
War this concept has seemed antiquated, as Russia and Serbia disinherited their
former comrades out of the USSR and Yugoslavian pavilions, and non-Western
centers of international art such as China and the Middle East rise in prominence
(Madra
2006
).
Curator Bice Curiger's opening statement questioned this structure as well: “By
adopting the title ILLUMInations the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice
Biennale also aspires literally to shed light on the institution itself, drawing attention
to dormant and unrecognized opportunities, as well as to conventions that need to be
challenged
Far removed from culturally conservative constructs of 'nation,' art
offers the potential to explore new forms of 'community' and negotiate differences
and affinities that might serve as models for the future” (Curiger
2011
). Curiger also
:::
3
The author's contribution to “We AR in MoMA” was a matrix of screaming faces titled “ARt
Critic Face Matrix,” a self-referential artwork that critiqued its own validity as an artwork,
reflecting on the role of MoMA NY to define what did or did not constituted art (Thiel
2010
).
