[-empyre-] Augmented reality as public art, mobile location based monuments and virtual memorials

[Rodney Berry]

Alan,

yes, that's something that makes me less inclined to make the effort with
today's mobile platforms for AR. You hit the nail on the head that locative
media is located, not just in space but in the technological platform -
particularly commercially located (iPhone or Android or Symbian? or poor
windows Mobile?). It's also a temporal location, a location in the history -
the hype-to-obscelescence curve of the technology.

That ephemerality is an attractive part of it though. Plaforms live on under
emulation and remediation in the newer platforms, like how we watch TV on
the internet.

I am still an augmented reality 'believer' since I first got involved with
the ARToolkit in 1999. I got into the ugly habit of messing with
barely-liftable 'laptops' instead of sexy mobile gear. The only AR artwork I
publicly exhibited was partly about the flakyness of the technology at the
time. The piece was protrayed as a malfunctioning museum exhibit from way
back in 2010, the year that long-ignored predictions of global innundation
by elvis imersonators finally came to pass.

"... The teething troubles of an infant technology, conveniently for me,
echo the behaviours of the same technology in its future senility
precariously sustained by layers of simulation.
..."<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dubl1dOIwkc>

I am still working on the tools I used for that piece. The tool,
DesignAR<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U4HY-CCQrU>depends on
TouchDesigner <http://www.derivative.ca>, a piece of commercial modelling
and interactive animation software, to work but, if you do happen to have
the FTE Commercial version, I can help people get it working. maybe if
others get using it, I'll be less slack about the details I've put off
fixing. :) I'm not a programmer though so the code hasn't changed since
2008.

I notice that people are using the Unity game engine with ARToolkit lately.
http://technotecture.com/augmentedrealitywithunity3d
http://infiniteunity3d.com/unity-3d-augmented-reality-breakfast/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Uwlx22Lxk8
http://developer.qualcomm.com/press/qualcomm-introduces-mobile-augmented-reality-platform-and-software-development-kit
http://pixelplacement.com/2011/02/24/working-with-string/

I think that could be a way to get something working on a few different
platforms to spread the 'platform location' a little wider and be flexible
and visually interesting for an artist to play with, as long as you don't
mind the gamey focus of the tools.

Rod.

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 11:25 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

>
> Hi - I'm not sure how to reply to this; I've been thinking about it. One
> thing about locative art is its oddly inert quality - it's _there_ and
> remains there, is fixed there. It's _there_ in the sense of geographic
> location, and _there_ in the sense of specific technology needed to reveal
> it, almost as if it's embedded in the technology, welded to it. The
> ephemerality lies in the fact that it takes a specific, soon-to-be- outdated
> technology to run, as well as energy; unlike a physical public monument, the
> energy is meted out within a specific regime of capital and control. So the
> 'We' in electracy you talk about is inextricably mixed with capital, with
> enclaving, and with the specifics of location; only the last is accessible
> to everyone. In this sense, what you call 'this virtual public sphere' is a
> 'real private sphere' whose manifestation or represen- tation is is virtual.
>
> - Alan
>
> ==
> email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
> webpage http://www.alansondheim.org
> music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
> current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qz.txt
> ==
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20110417/4aa8ed8d/attachment.html>