[-empyre-] Will Pappenheimer self-Intro

Tue Apr 26 01:47:47 EST 2011

Hello all. 

Patrick scheduled me for the last week of the ManifestAR month and since I haven't heard from him about this week, I thought I'd jump in. I’ve been following posts as much as I can while trying to get out of the fog of events we’re involved in currently. Also as a founding member of ManifestAR, I will start with a few opening remarks related to my interest in this medium and try and make them relevant to the discussion I have followed so far. My hope might be, with other interesting comments preceding, to explore AR as a phenomenological and a discursive medium.

 Reality is always already augmented; by culture, by perception, by psyche, by desire, by institution, by nation, by science, by law, etc., etc. In fact when I say reality, I like to say, “so-called” reality. I derive a statement like this from my fuzzy knowledge of the no longer so reputable French philosophers. I hope it is clear that I do not mean it in any utopian sense. Tamiko’s intro demonstrates this point in the spirit or legend dimensions of human culture, and it is no less true I think today, though the animism might be directed more towards a popular culture. Artists and authors could well be understood as augmenters of reality or those who tamper with the reality that is already augmented.

 While the idea that reality is augmented is not necessarily a spatial concept, and it can, as Patrick mentioned, be a systematic principle, the particular development of a located AR is what attracted me to this medium. While AR has been around for a while, to my knowledge it hasn’t been so geo-located as at this juncture. For the first time we are talking about digital or network constructs which are “here” or “over there” or about to “pass by in front of us” in public space. To convey a kind of phenomenological experience, and I think when we talk about phenomenology at this point we have to include an almost sensoral experience of Internet and computer life, because it is so integrated into what larger and larger portions of the world engage in daily, I want to describe both the process of making this work and the experience of viewing it through a smart phone.

 Like a number of other members of ManifestAR, Mark Skwarek, introduced/ seduced me into AR and we have spent a lot of time together erecting both our projects and others in and around NYC and now Boston. It is important to convey that the process of making AR works is only half spent in front of the computer, the other half is spent out in the car, walking around in freezing weather, and at other times trying to get documentation footage in situations where cameras are not allowed. We are talking about the installation, adjustment and functioning of works in space and the recording of their presence that at times is a kind of “bootie” not unlike graffiti art practices. And perhaps, the greatest rewards of the final project is the engagement of the people on site, that they might have seen the augments, talked about them, blogged them or perhaps barred them from being viewed. One might be tempted to describe a principal of this work as juxtaposition, but this is a practice which involves more a mixture of digital network production, physically spatial positioning and public social engagement.

 In this reincarnation of AR, the smart phone plays a big role, in my extended view of the contemporary phenomenological. Needless to say the cell phone is computer, social network, media conduit recorder all-in-one. It carries with it the weight of use value and the emotional ties of network social life (however impoverished one might judge them to be) that critical analysis will have to chase to keep up with. It transports the informational grid and self-identifies in the geo-located grid.  When you hold up the phone and turn the camera on you have the experience of seeing through this thin veil like device, linked into all that the Internet carries, to a live scene beyond. Peripheral unmediated vision lines up with screen vision. (And let’s not forget that whatever this deceptively simple technology masks in a black box, isn’t all perception mediated anyway?) Into this view appear the objects from AR, brought into being by the very same network that a large part of the world invests with increasing importance and interdependence. Thus cell phone AR, on location, in public space, is an intersection of networks lined up with physical space. It requires the body to move to see, without tethered headgear and expensive equipment. As Tamiko has pointed out, it often encourages a shared social experience of viewing.

 Again, my intention here is to try and outline this experience, not to suggest an idealized technology.

 A word about technological access. Certainly more than half the world is not privy to these technologies, and that fact should not be lost. But the other half of the world is and they waste no time using it and participating in it. Most of the millions using these technologies are far less privileged than we are, speaking as a university based educator. Compared to the previous computer science laboratory set up for AR, this apparatus can be downloaded and in use in five minutes and I think most cell phone users would know how to do it. This as a little bit more like television access, which I think very few of us tend to think of as privileged.

Another asset to this particular medium at this early moment, is that it is essentially un-privatized and primitive. The simplicity of 3-D objects and graphic elements that can be employed and the unpredictability of rezzing gives artwork in this medium a conceptual or conjectural quality that lets the viewer makeup the rest of the proposition. Many of the works we have engaged in suggest a larger possibility through an exemplary augment. This is not at all unlike other trajectories in art. What is different is perhaps that the content suggests a virtual life injected or superimposed onto a physical life. So instead of holding a gun in the air to suggest the shooting down of a plane (Chris Burden) Mark Skwarek erases the Statue of Liberty with a floating updating patch of sky downloaded from a real time WebCam. We should neither say that this work is purely conceptual, because it relies on a reasonably successful augmentation in situ. It needs to be carried out and many of us artists are interested in the aesthetics of the medium.

Sander Veenhof’s Photoshoped sign at MOMA saying “No AR allowed past this point” which became the challenge for the “We R In MoMA” exhibition there, points towards the not yet but precious unregulated space that this medium currently offers, and perhaps not for long. I started this intro with the idea that reality is always already augmented and the question in this case might be; who controls the augmentation? If we can put any augment anywhere, and if augments are figured as examples of network objects of increasing significance, then the interest at this time in intervention or incursion into regulated physical space is understandably poignant. An augment that suggests a challenge to conventional or institutionally held physical and ideological space might indeed, as an image, present a formidable challenge. The resurrection of a virtual Tankman in Tiananmen Square by 4 Gentlemen represents an example of this potential. As artists, we do not necessarily create works with an aim to effect social change. We might hope for this. I’m not sure we would be particularly good at effecting social change. We do it perhaps as an example, as a challenge, as a transgression. What is unique here is the advent of virtual challenges in a complex mixture of lived or mediated physical space.

 My own particular interest has been to test the limits and boundaries of what is acceptable as art, with art understood as a social and categorical construct worth testing.  At this time, that’s not so difficult to do using anything known as “new media”. With located AR, the elite highly controlled spaces of the artworld can be permeated without permission and a different exhibition can be installed, if perchance to call into question what we think we know about as “real” and or “virtual” constructs in public space.

Will Pappenheimer

Artist and Educator at Pace University

Email: willpap at gmail.com

www.willpap-projects.com

Will Pappenheimer is an artist and professor at Pace University, New York. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles, the ICA and Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Exit Art, Florence Lynch, Postmasters, Vertexlist and Pocket Utopia galleries in New York, San Jose Museum of Art in ISEA 06/ZeroOne, Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich, the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Ireland for ISEA 09, FILE 2005 at the SESI Art Gallery, Sao Paulo and Xi’an Academy of Art Gallery, China. His grants include an NEA Artist Fellowship, Traveling Scholars Award from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Turbulence.org, Rhizome,org at the New Museum and a large scale public network sculpture for the City of Tampa. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, NY Arts International, Art US, the New York Times for Art Basel Miami 2003, the Boston Globe, EL PAIS, Madrid, Liberation, Paris, Magazine Électronique du CIAC, Montreal, MSNBC.com and ZedTV, Canadian Broadcasting and is included in Christiane Paulʼs recent historical edition of “Digital Art.”
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