[-empyre-] Will Pappenheimer self-Intro

[Conor McGarrigle]

Hi Christina

At the moment there's just this one http://www.vimeo.com/20077042 I made 
on a NAMA walk through the city centre with a few performances along the 
way, there are more professional versions being edited. There's also a 
set on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/stunned/sets/72157625027390225/

On 30/04/11 17:30, christina mcphe wrote:
> Brilliant, Conor.......!
>
> Is there a youtube or vimeo walkthrough (movie made of walking around 
> Dublin while 'in' NAMAland)...?
> On Apr 28, 2011, at 8:44 AM, Conor McGarrigle wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>> 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.”
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
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