[-empyre-] is AR objects?

[simon]

Dear <<empyreans>>,
I have been enjoying the discussion so far. I would like to question, 
with Rob Myers, the normalisation and making unproblematic of a 
simulacral suburbia - wonderful phrase -, such as SL exemplifies, and 
suggest that it is the very objecthood, as telos of AR, or even as one 
of its inflections, that gets in the way of its augmenting reality.

Adding more objects to reality - the multiplication of representations - 
does it really augment reality? Or is there a sort of deficit and 
detraction, an 'owing to' which rather than increasing the richness of 
experience diminishes it - as it adds interest and even in so doing?

I would like to ask how reality might be augmented outside of 
(over-)drawing on the debt owed to objects and outside the consequent 
technological over-determinations of an encoded representation of 
reality (and the subsequent access issues to technical means): what else 
is it apart from adding objects to reality we can do with AR? The 
question as to whether the objects of AR are real - or indeed how to 
make them more (and less) real - seems to me to be secondary to this 
question of how reality may be augmented.

I suppose I am asking where to plug AR in that it might produce 
something new beyond its technical means (and their renewal - and 
renewed chicness). And raising the critical spectre of an augmentation 
problematising and perverting the simulacral satisfaction of a 
strip-mall secondment of those means through the creation of new senses, 
a 'plugging in' to 'for' a new sense. The sense of gaming is relevant 
here not for the fact of plugging the body in but for stripping the body 
down in order to allow something new to emerge, from a pool of anxiety, 
maybe.

(This anxiety I would speculate derives from the very anxiety that 
objectivity (in the objecthood) arouses in making promises that it can't 
keep of an ultimate ground, in the object's inability to keep it real.)

Best,

Simon Taylor

www.squarewhiteworld.com
www.brazilcoffee.co.nz