Augmenting Wilderness: Points of Interest in Pre-connected Worlds

Abstract

This research looks at the way the aesthetics of object-oriented ontology performs in association with augmented reality art made on the borders of Internet connection. The focus of the research is on the notion of ‘wilderness onticology’ by Levi Bryant, and the ideas of ‘hyperobjectivity’ by Timothy Morton, while examining artworks by George Ahgupuk, Alvin Lucier, Mark Skwarek, Nathan Shafer, v1b3, and John Craig Freeman.

Most of the conclusions of the research point to the praxis of the art historical anti-tradition as a tool for negotiating ontologies of the wilderness, or the unknown, as well as the virtual objects which exist there, for creating socially useful forms of art. Other topics include the usage of the Earth art binary of site/non-site, media ecology and the flanuer.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1 Introduction

Figure 13.1 is a QR code for this chapter, which will launch a channel called “Augmenting Wilderness” when scanned using the Junaio mobile AR application, so that the reader can hear some of the audio tracks embedded in this essay, or follow some links to cited works. This chapter also makes the same work available on an identical channel, on the Layar mobile app. Augmented reality art is gaining common relevance by recuperating into this type of commercially viable interactive print, which is based on targets instead of geolocation. It is easier to monetize and advertise with. AR in contemporary usage, however, remains an intrinsically global and viscous practice, whether it is functioning in this sort of consumerist enterprise or if it is a radical intervention of everyday life.

Fig. 13.1

QR code for “Augmenting Wilderness”

This chapter is going to look at a few projects that have constructed AR works in the worldwide public sphere—works steeped in the anti-tradition, practicing a flat ontology and presented on the borders of an increasingly connected world. They are unseen hubs in a worldwide social network; temporally localized, globally mobile—multiplicitous points of interest in the wilderness.

I am Sitting in a Room was produced in 1969, one of the earliest compositions to incorporate electromagnectic tape and feedback (Fig. 13.2). The piece takes Lucier’s recorded voice and records the playback of it in a room, where the room itself restructures the work into ambient static, ultimately getting rid of Lucier’s stutter and creating a resonant frequency.

Fig. 13.2

I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier (1969), audio, 15:23 (All rights courtesy of the artist, image source: Nathan Shafer in the Creative Commons)

Today Lucier’s work is an early representation of the way artists can intertwine digital media and physical location to develop mobile augmentations in the world. ‘Room’ is a global work, that can be accessed or recreated anywhere one takes recording equipment. When it was originally conceived, it came with a set of instructions on how to recreate the work hyperlocally, in one’s own room. Participants started with the original recording of Lucier speaking and played it in a room, rerecording it, over and over until it becomes ambient static, shaped by the space they are temporally in.

2 AR, OOO

Augmenting wilderness is a practice in augmented reality art making—the process of enmeshing digital objects with pre-connected worlds. Pre-connection references the absence of wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) within an ecosystem or community, but not the effects of it, which are evident in its local manifestations and are ubiquitous in the augmented object’s realm of attraction. Pre-connection precludes the idea that eventually the entire world will be universally connected to the Internet, so it is a temporal descriptor, albeit based on a very optimistic prediction about the future of technological ubiquity. Pre-connection is going to be a contemporary, temporal condition of some areas on the planet, where either a lack of human population or environmental factors, keep the space signal from integrating with the local media ecosystem via ambient radio waves (Wi-Fi). Radio waves, satellite signals and space weather are part of the nonlocal intermedia landscape of human mobility from global to interplanetary, but presently are Anakin to the social wilderness, a wilderness completely outside of human construct or perception.

The use of the term wilderness in relation to AR adopts Levi Bryant’s wilderness onticology, “(it) should not be conceived as the absence of humans, but rather in terms of a flat plane of being where humans are among beings without any unilateral, overdetermining role… humans dwell in wilderness without the wilderness being reduced to a correlate of thought,” (Bryant 2011) looking at the wilderness as a multiplicitous ‘difference engine’, in the context of object-oriented ontology (OOO), an aesthetic philosophy of being that takes the perceived reality of objects out of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which predicates the existence of objects on the human-world correlate of them (Kant 1781). Defining wilderness, for the sake of augmented reality as an artistic practice, is more a discussion than definition, as Oeschlaeger notes, “the issue involves the theorie upon which praxis will rest—the idea of wilderness itself. Whatever this idea, the conceptual difference will be reflected in practice” (Oeschlaeger 1991).

Certain theoretical aspects of augmented reality artistic collectivism are ecologically parallel to OOO, especially the metaphysical nature of the AR ‘art-object’, which focuses “on the informational relationship between object and human viewer, or the political and economical context surrounding the artwork’s reception” (Jackson 2011). OOO emerged at around the same time as mobile AR collectivism (2009–2010), so it is no surprise that there are similarities due to their temporal proximity: there are issues of critical reception for both groups because of their incorporation of non-traditional platforms like social networks and blogging—both groups are also academically suspect in many circles, (OOO is unconcerned with the Analytic vs. Continental beef, and AR is equally unconcerned with Modernism vs. Post-Modernism).

Early critical issues concerning augmented reality as an emergent art form are described as the “antiquated VR pipe dreams” via the new media blog, Rhizome.org, taken from fictional depictions of AR and the use of the ‘web browser’ as an artistic metaphor. The ‘VR pipe dreams’, which William Gibson fictionalized in his 2007 novel Spook Country, as “cartographic attributes of the invisible”, or “spatially tagged hypermedia,” (Gibson 2007) are what viewers are truly expecting to see when they first experience AR. Augmented wilderness, then, is a good place as any to examine the basic instability of contemporary AR, in contrast to a virtual fantasy world overlaid on top of our collective expectations of it as an artistic medium. AR is a ‘specialized’ sub-set of the global media ecosystem, what Ian Bogost describes as a microhabitat (in terms of media ecology) with the value of the specialized media being “less important than the documentation of its variety and application” (Bogost 2011). Like the health of a biological habitat—media ecologies measure their health in variety and application.

3 POIs

Singular augmented reality pieces, commonly referred to as points of interest (POIs), are augmented objects in a world of other equivalent objects, where humans are just one group of beings. Like other objects, or works of art, these POIs are not existentially contingent on human cognition—their being and their properties are different things. T.S. Elliott’s objective correlate is viable for many artists working in the modernist or postmodernist traditions, but it is inconsequential when discussing the formal characteristics of AR artworks without their existences sharing an equal ontological footing with their properties or physical attributes. The function of juxtaposing AR and OOO, is not to elucidate or explain formalist aesthetic philosophies, or to open a critical inquiry into any particular works given status as art, object/subject, or object/thing; but to illustrate how augmented reality art performs, when looked at in a flat ontology, in spite of Kant’s correlate, a dated, homocentric view of the universe that is counter-intuitive to our current worldview, where kids grow up knowing that things happen on exoplanets, like Gliese 436 b, a water planet the size of Neptune covered with ‘hot ice’ (Gillon et al. 2007). Or that there are diamond volcanoes on hot carbon planets that have surface landscapes of duning pencil lead (Clark 2012). These amazing aspects of the literal wilderness in the known universe—do not need human observation to exist, we can guess at their existence mathematically or theoretically, but the literal local manifestations of the objects themselves, these difference engines, are fine without us being physically present and observing them, especially since the practice of our observation is changing.

By now the thing of AR has become second nature to us—people wandering about; staring at the world through little glowing screens, looking for POIs—is commonplace, even treated with speculative disdain by an older generation, who see smart phones as brain-eating mobile pacifiers, working to devolve our sapience. As a process, mobile media observes the human aesthetic experience, enmeshing objects in the world, what Timothy Morton, refers to as, the aesthetic dimension. “(It) is the causal dimension, which in turn means that it has the vast nonlocal mesh that floats “in front of” objects (ontologically, not “physically” in front of them)” (Morton 2013).

AR is a new art medium, literally and physically operating in the nonlocal causal mesh Morton elucidates. At the present moment, AR has two different ways of being, or documented varieties: by attaching augments to a target (something that is scanned by a computer, generating an AR object, or POI), or by attaching augments to a geolocation (your computer knows where it is on Earth, which generates an AR object/POI). Currently, most developers and artists are using AR browsers, which are proprietary mobile applications for smart devices.

4 Radio Babies

Before looking at some specific AR art projects, which illustrate a flat ontology in the wilderness—Fig. 13.3 is an artwork by George Ahgupuk, called Radio Babies from 1940. It is ink and watercolor on bleached animal skin, with a stitched red sinew border. The image drawn on the skin depicts a fully clothed newborn flying from the bell horn of a radio, through the air, across the unseen ether all around us, to an Iñupiat family with a radio antenna at their cabin many miles away in Bethel. The white man at the bell horn is Joseph Romig, an early doctor in territorial Alaska. He would help aid in deliveries via radio, a proto-telephonic version of action at a distance. Early telemedicine. Radio Babies shows an immediate technological connection between remote locations (pre-connected worlds), and the way information exists in an ecosystem as part of the human experience inside of it. One of the notable elements of the work is Ahgupuk’s ability to take a technological marvel (radio communication), being used for good (family medicine) and illustrate it with a pronounced bit of magical realism (the baby flying on radio waves) personifying nonlocal action via technology.

Fig. 13.3

Radio babies by George Ahgupuk (1940), ink and watercolor on skin (Photo: Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center)

Another poetic illustration of technology in Radio Babies is the gigantic see-through reel-to-reel screen on top of Mt. McKinley in the background, titled the ‘J.H. Romig Radio Babies Pricelist’, showing what people can expect to pay for family telemedicine services, boys and girls start out at $200, with discount prices for a twin, and notable discounts for triplets and quadruplets. Ahgupuk’s written words in the painting are as much a part of the environment as the images of buildings and mountains, with the words “Umbrella Roadhouse” and “Rainy Pass” geolocated on their watercolor locations. Radio Babies practices a flat ontology where the ambient information in a place is equivalent to the other objects in it, without losing the complex humanness that is so apparent in the artistic depiction of the technology (the pricelist and the healthy family are both effected by the radio communicator). Radio Babies is a nonlocal networked media piece, made with locally available (and traditional) materials, which also places it firmly in the canon of Alaskan art history.

5 Anti-tradition

In 1996, when Nicholas Negroponte was looking at the future of digital media art from the beginnings of the MIT MediaLab, he wrote, “the digital superhighway will turn finished and unalterable art into a thing of the past. The number of mustaches given to Mona Lisa is just child’s play” (Negroponte 1996). He was mentioning Duchamp’s ready-mades tangentially, but more importantly, he invoked a spirit many artists refer to as the anti-tradition, which has been part of the networked or digital aesthetic since its inception. The anti-tradition isn’t an art movement, but rather a variegated practice of producing counter-culture art, which has been going on for a very long time, from Bouzingo to Pussy Riot. The Canadian poet Christian Bök places the historical onus of the anti-tradition on the ‘pataphysical literature of Alfred Jarry (Bök 2002) whose major literary influence was the drunken dithyrambic fantasies of François Rabelais, a writer from the European Renaissance. Negroponte’s enthusiasm for a society full of malleable cultural objects has been given a new technological tool for the anti-tradition with the advent of the ‘digital superhighway’.

Regardless of when and where the anti-tradition emerged, its various practices and applications have usually aligned with revolutionary or countercultural political movements of the day—for example, members of the Situationist International were in the Latin Quarter during the 1968 riots in Paris and members of the Provo Group hijacked a balcony in the Vatican delivering an anti-religious Easter sermon before they were arrested. What is important to note is how works from the anti-tradition are quintessentially of the time, with each socially useful or relevant form these artists took to counter the dubious cultural dialectics of their time. As Gregory Sholette wrote, “If socially useful art is ultimately determined by the society it serves, the artist as tool maker must, by necessity, look to the public sphere, and not to the realm of art, for the logic of her work” (Sholette et al. 2004).

Apart from the anti-tradition, AR art has ancestors in Earth art and conceptualism; roots in Fluxus, punk rock, the Situationist International, Fin-de-siècle literature, cyberpunk and 1990s style Interventionism. It cut its teeth with the twenty-first century’s international Occupy movements. The Manifest.AR manifesto, from early 2011, posits that AR artists “create subliminal, aesthetic and political AR provocations, triggering Techno-Disturbances in the substratosphere of Online and Offline Experiences… Augmented reality is a new Form of Art, but it is Anti-Art… It is a Relational Conceptual art that Self-Actualizes” (Manifest.AR 2011). Since its inception, Manifest.AR has consistently produced collaborative projects from the public sphere, which have integrated with social movements and revolutions across the globe.

6 Usage

When AR browsers became available as mobile applications, it was a memetic shift in the usage of AR, from the preconscious imaginings in sci-fi novels with headsets and cyberpunks—to the one from quotidian existence where tourists hold up mobile phones in shopping arcades. Initially, the works of art produced inside of this new usage of AR seemed like they would be a combination of locative media and digital sculpture, which by and large they are, but it has been adapting to the common usage in society. Gibson described the locative artist as “annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices…” (Gibson 2007). The ‘device’ referred to is the artist’s mobile phone; which is not the preferred method for viewing ‘locative media’ in Spook Country (VR headsets are), the artist’s mobile phone was a second best—an ad hoc example, put together to illustrate the important locative work the fictional artist made for VR helmets.

Just because an object has certain properties or features, does not preclude that they will be used, or used in the way they were intended. As Sheller notes, “Unlike commercial applications, artists often draw on more disruptive and critical traditions that seek to defamiliarize the familiar, or to heighten our sensual awareness of location, or to offer new forms of place making and public engagement” (Sheller 2013). With the myriad of commercially available AR glasses, on the verge of redefining AR, we should think of those ‘VR pipe dreams’, which were disregarded for the use of less encapsulating smart phones, and then reinvented again, as a more transitional and ubiquitous form between VR helmet and phone, and know that artists are going to misuse Google Glass, or whatever the object in common usage is… eventually.

The unintended usage of objects being spread from local application to application—is part of the nature of memetic reproduction and variation, and is the way networked media aesthetics create niches in media ecologies. As biologist Richard Dawkins, who coined the term meme, explains, “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm and eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process, which in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” (Dawkins 1976) This imitation of usage is evident in the way some youths are smashing the screens of their smart phones, in a stylish sort of identity protestation, like the torn jeans of the 1980s (Wax 2013), “a new meme will have a greater chance of penetrating the meme pool if it is consistent with other memes in that environment” (Distin 2005).

The anti-tradition political-aesthetic practices of the Situationist International gained a newfound relevance when Internet browsers became a widely used format. Psychogeography is one of these object-practices from SI, it is a way of participating in the world based on the human situation within it, or developing an aesthetic that mitigates between the unseen history of the immediate environment or the psychic artifacts left in our ecosystems, (this connection between Situationist praxis and locative media was referenced in Spook Country as well). OOO refers to these objects as reflexive objects. Or in Foucault’s pre-OOO observation, “a form of reflection… that involves for the first time, man’s being in that dimension where thought addresses unthought and articulates itself upon it” (Foucault 1970).

Geolocative AR is still currently in the public sphere, free for anyone to access, and no permits needed to put a POI in a secure location, as with Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s collaborative work from 2010, infltr.AR (Fig. 13.4), which put virtual hot air balloons porting Twitter feeds from the outside world into the White House and the Pentagon. Essentially, the White House and the Pentagon are part of the public wilderness that viewers can see from an enclosure and take pictures of. Just like tourists on a road trip through the Midwest US, it is a true point of interest, in its original context, part of the American Landscape, made for visitor locations, or great places for an anamnestic photograph. Secured government facilities are not wildernesses that are protected per se, but definitely objects that are actively being preserved, and left relatively unknown to the normal citizenry.

Fig. 13.4

infltr.AR by Mark Skwarek and Sander Veenhof (2010), AR intervention at White House and Pentagon using Twitter (Photos: Sander Veenhof)

Both augmented reality and the wilderness are difference engines, which create entanglements in communities; they are also object-ideas that are not anywhere in particular. They are ‘viscous’ global objects, like the Internet and the World Wide Web. Morton refers to these sort of global objects that are both ‘nonlocal’ and ‘viscous’ as hyperobjects. One of his key examples is global warming. It is an object that cannot be reduced to a singular object one can touch—a happening and concept in the world that has visible effects and consequences, which can work to illustrate it. With global CO2 at over 400 parts per million, global warming can be seen in extreme weather in the cities on the eastern seaboard, or in Alaska, with glacial retreat.

7 Anamnesis

Figure 13.5 is an AR work of mine, built on site, 120 miles from Anchorage in Kenai Fjords National Park, the Exit Glacier Terminus Project. Exit Glacier is a glacial extension from the Harding Ice Field and derived its name because it was the glacier from which the first white explorers to travel the area used to exit the ice field. It has been in dramatic decline for a several decades now, and has shrunk to quite a small size, compared to its former self, a physical manifestation of both the hyperobject called global warming and another hyperobject called the cryosphere (the sphere of frozen water on the surface of the Earth).

Fig. 13.5

Exit Glacier Terminus Project (2001 Terminus) by Nathan Shafer (2013), five different AR versions of glacial termini where built on location at Exit Glacier, this is the terminus from the year 2001 (Source: Nathan Shafer)

Exit Glacier is one of a very small number of glaciers in the world that are easily accessible from a highway. The US National Park Service has been aggressive in its work to illustrate global warming at this glacier. The AR project digitally reconstructs five of the former termini on location in Kenai Fjords National Park, based wholly on the glacier itself as a reflexive object: 2001 (year of 9/11), 1994 (Mosaic, the first popular web browser), 1979 (the artist’s birth year), 1964 (Good Friday Earthquake in Southcentral Alaska) and 1953 (The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando). These years were selected for their connection to the variety of human experience, relatable to the timeframe of the glacier, setting up an anamnesis of the viewer’s environment, projecting their memories and experiences onto the augments that are points of interest at the glacier. There is a viscous collective knowledge intrinsic to the human condition in viewing mediated wilderness, which is activated by language.

Exit Glacier also encapsulates one of the continuous multiplicities for the event of augmenting wilderness, the bits of code needed to make geolocation-based AR work on site. On contemporary mobile devices the necessary elements, which must be active are the compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS and Internet connectivity. Internet connectivity is the wild card is the group. GPS is usually faster than Wi-Fi and universally accessible on mobile computers, though Alaska’s latitude on the planet can create dead zones in valleys or mountains. The radio waves needed to create wireless fidelity get distorted in the wildernesses of the Earth, as do the signals from GPS satellites. The basic write-around is downloading the entire augment before walking out of cell-range into a pre-connected world, and hope that the GPS stays relative. This is not optimal and incredibly Unstable. A portable Wi-Fi signal must be brought into the pre-connected wilderness, like an iron lung, for AR to keep breathing on site.

This is one of the banes of the site-specificity for works of AR art. The Exit Glacier Terminus Project is built on-location. To experience the piece, viewers must drive to Seward, Alaska, and go through the entire process of loading the application and layer on their devices, then carry a Wi-Fi hotspot out to the site with them. Once there, the ebb and flow of the GPS causes the piece to move as you are standing still viewing it. This is not unlike problems Earth Art faced. It is a problem of being, the existence of the work itself, without even getting into the meaning or quality of the work. Few people literally went out to view Robert Smithson’s work in situ to evaluate it in person, or meditate at it, or whatever viewers do when they view a work of art. One of the concerns here is that documentation of the work becomes a keen feature in the process of viewing it, since that is precisely how most viewers will experience it. It involves a certain sense of wandering and tenacity to get to a geocoded POI in person, albeit one more in line with the nineteenth century notion of the flânuer in the city, since metropolitan areas are where POIs tend to be most stable. Benjamin wrote, “the anamnestic intoxication in which the flânuer goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often posses itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as something experienced and lived through” (Benjamin 1982). In rural Alaska, the flânuer is akin to naturalists like John Muir, walking the city streets and National Parks, seeing new landscapes by virtue of the same ‘anamnestic intoxication’ for the natural world as the flânuer, sort of fascinated and cool at the same time, constantly seeking out new points of interest. Hoy has written that, “AR technology encourages a praxis-based approach to spatial knowledge. Its incorporation of mobile computing means that the body is activated in a process of movement and spatial exploration” (Hoy 2013). The ‘anamnestic intoxication’ would be the theoretical body knowledge and inherited collective memory, flooding the viewer on location.

The fact that mobile AR must be viewed through a mediator (smart device) lends itself to a global aesthetic usage. When most AR works are viewed, they can be captured via screen grabs or photos as they actually are. Reproductions of these works can be more artistically mannered, or through proper documentation, have a higher resolution than viewing on site. It is a portion of the human aesthetic that gets disturbed, the way we are intrinsically linked to the places we are at. Breathing on site, or observing a cloud pass in front of the sun, as the POIs stay digitally backlit, seemingly unaware of the solidity of the objects in the environment in which they are placed. The issue that remains for site-specific AR, and one that becomes important for the global audience is how to experience a large-scale geolocation-based AR work, without having to travel there.

8 Variety and Application

Earth art experienced a similar problem in display, but Smithson’s praxis of the site/non-site provides a way of adapting to the presentation of AR artworks in formal situations. An earthwork created on site in the mountains is visible to the few who get out there and see it, the GPS-equipped hiker, or tech-savvy flânuer. This is the site of the work of art, and it is the same format as a geolocation-based AR piece, like ‘Exit Glacier’. When the work is displayed in a gallery or museum, Earth artists would make an indoor earthwork, which they called a non-site. As Smithson states in A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites, “(it) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site…to understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of idea” (Smithson 1996). A non-site equivalent in AR works is the target-based POI, which locates a work with a displayable target. Ultimately, when AR develops significant collectorship with dealers it will most likely be a target-based enterprise, with AR artists committing their extra energies to developing large geolocation-based works as their flagship projects, that are not for sale. The thing about site-specific AR however, is that no matter how intrinsically or technically the POI is tied to a literal geo-coordinate, the POI is digital, and it can be in a 1,000 places at once, this is part of its regime of attraction; POIs are digital objects that overlay our mediated experiences of the world. AR is by nature, a nonlocal being and a global medium. It is pleasantly unstable and bound to the Earth the way vampires are bound to the moon.

Borealises (Fig. 13.6) is a collaborative work between Christopher Manzione’s Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP) and myself, and was included in a Manifest.AR group show called Bushwick: AR Intervention. It was originally conceived as an AR version of the northern lights to be displayed over Anchorage, which has horrible light pollution in the winter. The northern lights are rarely seen from within the city during our long dark months. AR browsers provided a way to see the borealises on mobile devices when the light pollution obfuscates them. With the global, multiplicitous nature of AR, the original animated POI went up in Bushwick, as part of the group show, at the same time it went up in Anchorage.

Fig. 13.6

Borealises III by Nathan Shafer and the Virtual Public Art Project (2011), digital/animated AR version of the northern lights, displayed above viewers, this screen grab comes from the first Wintermoot Festival in Anchorage, Alaska from 2010 (Photo: Jared Chandler)

Geolocation doesn’t have to be in a singular altitude, latitude and longitude (the geo-code). Putting POIs up in an AR browser is like putting a blog post up on a website (third-party platforms). The direct observation of the work does not have to be on-site, and it rarely is. Gail Rubini and Conrad Gleber, of v1b3 (Video in the Built Environment), made NEWzzzzz (Fig. 13.7) as part of the annual Wintermoot Mixed Reality Festival (Fig. 13.8) in Anchorage, held during Fur Rendezvous, a festival held around the Iditarod sled dog race, at the close of winter in Alaska.

Fig. 13.7

NEWzzzzz by Gail Rubini and Conrad Gleber (2013), AR (Photo: Nathan Shafer)

Fig. 13.8

(a) & (b) Wintermoot mixed reality festival organized by the Institute for Speculative Media, pictured in (a) is Mark Skwarek’s congressional pizza (Photo: Nathan Shafer), (b) is noxious sector collective, haunting at 4th and E, (Photo: Nathan Shafer)

NEWzzzzz is a scrolling feed of red letters comprised of various headlines from newspapers in rural Alaska. It is relative geolayer, that is, it is visible to anyone who opens the layer, wherever they are, because it is geo-coded to be exactly where the mobile device connecting to the layer is. Location is the target.

V1b3 works with the printed word in many of their projects, as well as the integration of projected video in the immediate media ecosystem. NEWzzzzz was able to blend these two formats into a mobile application, which illustrated cultural feeds, exterior to most viewers’ expectations of them, the same issue of the ‘VR pipe dreams’.

Several artists in Manifest.AR have made relative AR works, Tamiko Thiel’s Reign of Gold (Fig. 13.9) illustrates the way the global economy occupies every centimeter of our world, for example.

Fig. 13.9

Reign of gold, Tamiko Thiel, AR (Photo: Nathan Shafer at Out North Contemporary Art House)

Non-Local (Fig. 13.10) is an on-going digital storytelling project of mine, set in a near-future Anchorage and based on the storytelling traditions of the circumpolar north, mixed with pulp science fiction and online gaming. The project is a series of short digital stories that group together as a larger narrative. In early 2013, Non-Local went up simultaneously in three geolayers on the Layar app in Anchorage, Seattle and Skidegate; and one target-based layer on the Junaio app in New York. The geolayers were part of a solo show at Noxious Sector in Seattle (Fig. 13.11). They all have a global filter, so the audio tracks could be heard from anywhere in the world, without having to see the local POI in person. Many of the POIs in Non-Local are placed in pre-connected worlds, and accessible only with the global filter running. They cannot be seen onsite, unless portable Wi-Fi is brought into the ecosystem, it was a way of attempting to make the wilderness accessible from a connected world.

Fig. 13.10

Non-Local: Cosmic Constant MRPG by Nathan Shafer (2013), AR with audio at Noxious Sector Projects, Seattle, Washington, pictured is an installation shot of the show where maps of the POIs were displayed (Photo: Ted Heibert)

Fig. 13.11

Non-Local: Cosmic Constant MRPG by Nathan Shafer (2013), AR with audio at Noxious Sector Projects, Seattle, Washington, pictured is the local POI at the show, an image of the Cosmic Constant MRPG story as a pulp sci-fi publication (Photo: Ted Heibert)

The Non-Local augment that went up in New York was a singular audio track called The Big Bad Broo, which told the story of two kids who stumble onto a massive alien civilization via a confused avatar in a fictional MRPG called Cosmic Constant. The group show it was included in was by the v1b3 collective with Christopher Manzione, called AR2View. They took photos in a Manhattan hotel, turned the photos into targets, on which they built an AR show, brilliantly illustrating the way AR (from the aesthetic dimension) can literally lay over objects in the real world. They published this book with the target-photos, and descriptions of the works. It was the second print project of three, the first, Scan2Go, published QR codes, which loaded artist projects. The third publication, ART2Make, is a series of g-codes, which can be used to 3D print the entire show of digital sculptures. Gleber has written of v1b3’s use of the printed book in new media, “published books are uniquely capable of melding artist imagery with conceptual intentions, with audience curiosity and interaction in much the same way that media artists use the Internet” (Gleber 2013).

EEG AR: Things We Have Lost (Fig. 13.12) is a research/development project by John Craig Freeman and Scott Kildall, which “allows participants to conjure up virtual objects by simply imagining them into existence using brainwave sensor technology” (Freeman 2013). EEG AR represents a turning point in the subject matter of augmented reality art, placing more of the actual objects to be presented in the hands (or minds, in this instance) of the participants.

Fig. 13.12

EEG AR: things we have lost by John Craig Freeman and Scott Kildall (2013), AR

Creat.AR (Fig. 13.13) by Mark Skwarek et al, has a similar praxis, for allowing participants to produce personalized POIs relative to wherever they are on the planet.

Fig. 13.13

creat.AR by Mark Skwarek et al. (2013), user-generated AR

The anamnesis intrinsic to both of these projects is procedural to their metaphysical being—existing to reflect the memory of something else. The databases behind both of these projects also mark an emerging method in distributed/relative AR. Instead of just targets or geocodes, there is a relative AR, like v1b3’s NEWzzzzz, or Thiel’s Reign of Gold, but it is also enmeshed with the participant who has loaded the AR layer. Users are able to choose the POIs around them.

When EEG AR was performed as a lab/clinic at FACT in Liverpool, they ran a room where test subjects would be plugged into a brainwave sensor, which measured their brainwaves, launching an SQL sequence to create POIs from a preloaded database.

Creat.AR lets participants turn anything they want into a POI, which will appear relative to their geo-coordinates. Participants do this by typing in what they would like to see on the local layer. Then a database connected to that layer, runs an Internet search, which formats the first image to pop up for the search phrase in the mobile browser.

These two projects are viscous and nonlocal—two properties of Morton’s hyperobjects. They are viscous in that, “the more you know about a hyperobject, the more entangled with it you realize you are” (Morton 2010). And nonlocal in that no participant in either project can accurately see the entirety of the work from where they are. Both works are distributed over the worldwide Wi-Fi ecosystem, which is closing in on our pre-connected spaces as we draw air. Anywhere there is a radio signal that can host an Internet connection, AR exists, whether it is manifesting locally or not.

9 Praxis

The Augmented Inuksuit Project (Fig. 13.14) is a K-12 education based collaborative AR work in Alaska, I initiated in 2012. Inuksuit is the plural form of inuksuk, which are stone landmarks used by the Inuit across the circumpolar north. Inuksuit demarcated portions of the wilderness for human use, i.e. good caribou hunting or summer fish camps. With students we built collaborative inuksuit, using toy-style blocks we built in an open-source 3D modeling program—these blocks made a set, from which were built class inuksuit. Inuksuit are reflexive objects in an artistic application towards an anamnesis of the wilderness, which position the social wilderness in the literal, and are viscous difference engines in Arctic art history.

Fig. 13.14

Augmented Inuksuit Project by the Institute for Speculative Media (2012), AR, (Photo: Nathan Shafer)

The variety and application of these objects inside of the microhabitat of AR, inside the larger media ecosystem, illustrate some of the praxis of augmenting wilderness—their usage entangled with OOO, working to decentralize the human mind as the metaphysical fulcrum upon which the existence of the cosmos hinges, making way for the equanimity for the wilderness outside of our infinitesimal pocket of the universe.