[-empyre-] Will Pappenheimer self-Intro

[Conor McGarrigle]

Hi All

I'd like to pick up on one aspect touched on in Will's introduction 
which hasn't had much attention (I'm late to the discussion so it's 
possible I missed it) that of AR as an interventionist tool and by 
extension a tool for political critique, particularly as a method of 
making visible information the authorities would rather was kept quiet 
and if I can give an example of a project which I feel illustrates the 
relevance of AR .

My experience of AR is from working with Layar on a project called 
NAMAland ( www.walkspace.org/namaland  sorry Dublin only) which 
visualised an aspect of the Irish financial collapse. At the risk of 
depressing you all with the details of what's going on here in Dublin 
the project is an AR overlay of Dublin which identifies ~120 properties 
(pulling from a growing SQL database) which were bought by NAMA a very 
controversial Government agency set up to buy bad speculative property 
loans from failing banks, spending around €40b in the process. 
Information on NAMA properties is restricted, the agency was exempted 
from FOI requests with a lot of powerful interests trying to keep 
information from getting out (I've received quite a few legal threats). 
So NAMAland was created as an attempt to publish this information in an 
accessible format and I was able to get my hands on an unofficial 
database pulled together from public domain sources anonymously which I 
geotagged and published as  an AR layar.

The response has been astonishing it was immediately picked up by the 
MSM who've been running with it ever since, it even featured on the main 
evening TV news on RTE the national broadcaster and has become very much 
part of  national debate on the financial disaster. I regularly give 
talks about it and lead NAMAland walks through the city even the name 
NAMAland has come into common usage. I attribute the response in a large 
part to the fact that it employs AR  and the power of the 
phenomenological experience of AR to make concrete what had been up to 
then very carefully abstracted. If I had released it as a list or a map 
I don't think the response would have been as significant.

On the important topic of access figures suggest that only about 35% of 
the population can access it on their phones but it has still gained a 
wider currency through word of mouth, through media coverage and as I'm 
discovering it has a second life as a retelling. Perhaps this is another 
aspect of AR? I haven't experienced the Manifest.AR MOMA intervention 
but I'm still quite a fan through accounts I've read and through seeing 
screenshots so I feel this is an aspect of AR which can work for those 
who can't experience it first hand.

As a last point I do feel that this ability to query geotagged SQL 
databases opens up so many options. I'd love to see an AR version of 
They Rule or  Hans Haacke's Shapolsky et al or why not wikileaks?


all the best


Conor




-- 
WalkSpace for the iPhone
www.walkspace.org






On 25/04/11 16:47, Will Pappenheimer wrote:
>
> 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 <mailto:willpap at gmail.com>
>
> www.willpap-projects.com <http://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 <http://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 <http://MSNBC.com> and 
> ZedTV, Canadian Broadcasting and is included in Christiane Paulʼs 
> recent historical edition of “Digital Art.”
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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