[-empyre-] Welcome Patrick Lichty

xDxD.vs.xDxD xdxd.vs.xdxd at gmail.com
Fri Apr 8 23:28:47 EST 2011


hello there!

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Julian Oliver <julian at julianoliver.com>wrote:

>
> AR is really a modern implementation of a very old idea, one seen with
> Phantasmagoria like Pepper's Ghost, some Op Art like Perspectival
> Anamorphosis,
> of Trome-l'Oeil and work by the (rather astonishing) Varini.
>

and let me add surrealists, dada etc :)

as if you look at it from a broad perspective, AR is not about "look through
your iPhone and see a dinosaur where there is none in the physical world",
but more about the idea that you can reinvent reality by creating layers of
it.

When we happily met Patrick in Rome, we went for a shopdropping run in which
we placed a series of boxes of an Augmented Reality Drug beside ordinary
products in the shop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXaoPPkpqUo

We have been using AR a lot in both its technical/technological form and
through the imaginaries that we can build on top of it. The AR Drug is a
part of it: the drug is actually an open source software which people can
plug into their wordpress blog to turn it into a full-scale AR (and cross
media) production platform (the software is called MACME
https://github.com/xdxdVSxdxd/MACME )

And all this is done by a fake institution called REFF who is currently
promoting a youth program for the "methodological reinvention of reality"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CfET1YyyKs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdD1g0fd94Q

which is oriented to helping students, activists, artists and, actually,
anyone to learn the technological and methodological tools that they can use
to "systematically reinvent reality".

As you can see from this link:

http://www.artisopensource.net/?s=REFF

we touched dozens of schools, universities, arts academies, festivals,
political squats, and it is really wonderful. Because what emerges
immediately by touching these issues, is that it is not about "technology",
but about "multiplication" and "stratification".

When we learn that there are tools and methodologies which we can use to
efficiently craft reality (be it through an iphone or through stickers, or
posters, or things hanging from a baloon or whatever), we feel very
comfortable with it, as a materialization of a tension we've been feeling
from a while, maybe, in this postmodern world in which just about everything
multiplies, becomes fluid and polyphonic.

Just a couple of links to some more actions we did that could prove to be
interesting in the discussion:

http://www.artisopensource.net/?s=squatting+supermarkets
Squatting Supermarkets: AR used with products' logos as markers to turn
logos into AR wikis onto which people could publish their information
(presented at the Share Festival in Turin it used a custom AR software then
published as open source that could be used to transform logos into AR
markers. Hundreds of students used the software for performative actions in
various parts of the world. Some of them even got some university credits
for performing a stickers-based version of this as a workshop during the
Share Festival.


http://www.artisopensource.net/2011/04/06/leaf-leaves-nature-and-augmented-reality/
Leaf++
The next project about AR that we will present together with AOS and
FakePress, at ISEA2011 in Istanbul: a platform that uses leaves as AR
markers, allowing you to create information and art directly on top of
leaves. The software will be ready (and released as free software) on about
the end of May and we will both present a scientific analysis of the
technology and an art performance using leaves


all these software tools also to add another thing:



> The fact that the art can be pose-reestimated independent of viewer
> position is
> the innovation wrought by software. That said, only because ARToolkit was
> open
> source do we have 'AR' in popular distribution today. Almost all of the
> first AR
> demos seen on YouTube use (with little or no credit) this toolkit.
> FLARToolkit
> (web delivered AR) and a vast variety of AR apps on Android and iOS still
> use
> this common code base.
>
>
while i do appreciate (a lot!) the availability of precious tools such as
ARToolkit, I must say that I feel a distinct trend in "overusing them".
Meaning that most of the time people just gram ARToolkit (but it happened
with Reactivision as well ) print out the markers, stick them onto something
and voilà, your new AR artwork is ready. Which is fine (i did it myself when
I created an AR Fluxus Box), obviously.

What I'm seeing a lot is that people forget to experiment and, most of all,
to collaborate in deep ways with the people who "do the programming". What
happens is that, incredibly, someone like the people at Metaio (they produce
Junaio AR Browser) and others, produce things which have more "impact" on
our lives and imaginaries than many of the artists. This is obviously not so
strange in the postmodern world, where it is still to be clearly defined who
exactly is the artist, and of what, and how.

But I really wanted to point this out. For example we really put lots of
effort into the production of new platforms to do AR and ubiquitous
technologies. Whenever we publish something we also publish the entire
software and tools and methodologies that was used to make it.

Pretty obvious by now, but it must be said. :)

Thanks for the great thread!

ciao!
xDxD
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20110408/8364c11b/attachment.html>


More information about the empyre mailing list