Abstract
This chapter describes augmented reality interventions led by the author in 2011 with the artist group Manifest.AR at the Venice Biennale, and in collaboration with the design office PATTU at the Istanbul Biennale. The interventions used the emerging technology of mobile augmented reality to geolocate virtual artworks – visible for viewers in the displays of their smartphones as overlays on the live camera view of their surroundings – inside the normally curatorially closed spaces of the exhibitions via GPS coordinates. Our interventions used the site-specific character of the technology to create works of art that stand in dialogue with the sites and will retain their relevance long after the biennials are over. The site figures as the canvas for the artworks and forms an integral visual and contextual component of each artwork. Unlike physical art interventions, the artworks cannot be removed or blocked by the curators or other authorities, and will remain at those locations as long as the artist desires. The artworks exploit the site-specificity as an integral part of the artwork while simultaneously questioning the value of location to canonize works of art, and the power of the curator as gatekeeper to control access to the spaces that consecrate works of art as part of the high art canon.
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Notes
- 1.
In October 2010 Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek organized the AR intervention “We AR in MoMA” (Veenhof 2010) for the Conflux Festival of Psychogeography (Conflux Festival 2010). Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling blogged the intervention on WIRED (Sterling 2010), MoMA tweeted “Nice, looks like we’re havin an ‘uninvited’ AR exhibition tomorrow!” (Museum of Modern Art 2010), and later in an interview with the New York Times the director of digital media welcomed our engagement with her museum (Fidel 2010).
- 2.
In 2012 the author helped the Caribbean Cultural Center and African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) to bring in a Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Grant to create “Mi Querido Barrio,” an augmented reality tour of the history and art of East Harlem. As AR Artistic Director for the project the author is conducting AR workshops for artists in East Harlem (Rockefeller Foundation 2012; CCCADI 2012).
- 3.
The author’s contribution to “We AR in MoMA” was a matrix of screaming faces titled “ARt Critic Face Matrix,” a self-referential artwork that critiqued its own validity as an artwork, reflecting on the role of MoMA NY to define what did or did not constituted art (Thiel 2010).
- 4.
Although Curiger refers frequently to the “five questions,” they are not to be found on the official Venice Biennale website. See for instance Flash Art (2011).
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the following people, without whose help much of what is described in this article would not have happened:
Lanfranco Aceti, Editor in Chief of LEA, Director of ISEA2011 and the Kasa Gallery of Sabanci University.
Özden Sahin, Co-Editor of LEA, Conference and Program Director of ISEA2011, Vice-Director and In-house Curator of the Kasa Gallery of Sabanci University.
Rick Reinhart, Director of the Samek Gallery, Bucknell University, and external Co-Editor of the special AR issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac “Not Here Not There.”
Simona Lodi, Share Festival Director, and Gionatan Quintini, Les Liens Invisible, who curated and organized the “Invisible Pavilion” intervention at the Venice Biennale. Many thanks for the wonderful collaboration with Manifest.AR!
Julie Upmeyer and Annika Weshinskey of Caravansarai artist residency in Istanbul for their support and networking. Without them, Invisible Istanbul would not exist.
My fellow artists at Manifest.AR: Sander Veenhof, Mark Skwarek, John Craig Freeman, Will Pappenheimer, Naoko Tosa, John Cleater and Lily and Honglei, for the ongoing journey together.
My fellow artists at PATTU: Cem Kozar and Işıl Ünal, who taught me so much.
Cornelia Reinauer, the Berlin-Istanbul Express, for support and deep insights.
Elif Dazkir, who wonders when I will remember the Turkish she taught me years ago.
Viviana Torre, Fausto Sartori and Lorenzo Urbani, who opened the doors to Venice for me.
Marco Ceresa and Bruce Leimsidor, who helped me to reach another level.
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Thiel, T. (2014). Critical Interventions into Canonical Spaces: Augmented Reality at the 2011 Venice and Istanbul Biennials. In: Geroimenko, V. (eds) Augmented Reality Art. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06203-7_2
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