[-empyre-] Welcome Patrick Lichty

[Lichty, Patrick]

Return of the Augment
In Simulations and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard wrote of the supercession of the virtual over the physical.  The mediascape would override material reality as the mediascape becomes supreme.  William Gibson, first in the “Idoru” trilogy,  then “Spook Country” wrote of the bleeding of the virtual into the physical.  This was done through the physicalization of the virtual pop idol Rei Toei in “All Tomorrow’s Parties” through a mix of 3d Printer and Star Trek-style molecular fabrication technology.  And, in “Spook Country”, the milieu of the book features an artist who create Augmented Reality sculptures of celebrities at their times of death.  The Baudrillardian mediascape has morphed into an informatic overlay, a universe of data overlaid upon the physical.

AR is no longer science fiction or solely the purview of researchers and avant-garde New Media artists.  Augmented Reality has been building to critical mass for the last few years, and with the ubiquity of camera-equipped smartphones, AR applications are flooding the market.  In addition, because of the technologies, the creation of Gibson’s virtual sculptures is a reality.   What does the emergence of AR signify in the development of the nature of the mediascape, what aesthetics does it present, what critical issues can it engage?  For this panel, I have invited a number of Augmented Reality artists and researchers, including Rodney Berry and the members of the global AR collective Manifest.AR.  In an age in which virtual and physical bleed together, what are the issues at hand?  Engaging these issues is what we hope to accomplish during this month’s discussions.


Conversations with Rod:
In talking with Rod about the reemergence of AR, we remarked that how a theory of AR seems to be inextricably linked to the technical capacity of the day.  For example, when Jaron Lanier was trying to champion VR as the next online medium, how could he know that the technology was really 20-30 years ahead of capacity?  Display technology was no way near what was needed, the head mounted display was more Ivan Sutherland than Vuzix, and there was just no infrastructure.  Now, almost everyone has a smart device of some sort that can support AR, the IT infrastructure is in place, and even with the new technologies. AR-ready videoglasses are available off the shelf for under $500.  This is similar to my rant against the CD-ROM in the 1980's - I thought it would never work because of price point, and I was terribly wrong.

So, is AR an emergent phenomenon, an outgrowth of exteant ideas and emergent technologies, or otherwise?