[-empyre-] Welcome Patrick Lichty

[Julian Oliver]

..on Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 03:28:47PM +0200, xDxD.vs.xDxD wrote:
> 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

Ahh this is great. Bookmarked for my next lecture on the topic!

> 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


Nice work.. 

Somewhat relatedly my colleague Danja Vasiliev and I have also taken a new
direction in tactical augmentation that doesn't deploy the traditional
camera+comuter+overlay model.   

The project is called 'Newstweek' and is a device to remotely manipulate news
read by other people on wireless hotspots (cafes, libraries, airports,
universities). 

By altering images and headlines in other people's browsers, we can literally
augment and alter world views, as read on smartphones, laptops and tablet
computers.

Here's a project video:

	http://vimeo.com/21707290

Some articles/interviews:

	http://vagueterrain.net/content/2011/01/newstweek-network-permeability-and-headline-hacking
	http://www.imperica.com/features/newstweek
	http://blogs.computerworld.com/17820/hackers_use_hidden_device_to_manipulate_news_at_wi_fi_hotspots

Project page:

	http://newstweek.com

Worth mentioning that the project will appear on Arte.tv in France and Germany
in early June.

> 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

Again, nice work! I wasn't at all aware of this.

> 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.
> 

Indeed, it has very much 'pidgeonholed' the definition.. Nonetheless, it also
popularised the definition in the first instance. Well before ARToolKit there
was a concept of augmented reality, of course, but far less widely known. The
growth of the term is synonymous with the spread of this early-ish technology I
think.

In any case, as AR becomes just another UX design context, as it becomes more
ubiquitous, the term Augmented Reality itself will recede from popular use,
perhaps die off as any term will of its own success.

Good to read you!

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany 
currently: Berlin, Germany 
about: http://julianoliver.com
follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver