Wearable Apocalypses: Enabling Technologies for Aspiring Destroyers of Worlds

Abstract

The urge to create art that escapes the frame and ventures into the world is a long-standing goal of artists which predates modern technologies. In honor of this I examine “Apocalypse,” an essay on the possibilities of street art that William S. Burroughs wrote as a collaboration with Keith Haring (pop and graffiti artist, social activist 1958–1990). While written in 1988, this essay can serve as a guide for current and future artists who work in Augmented Reality interventions into public spaces by situating their work within a 2000+-year-old cycle of revolution and counterrevolution in art, culture, and spirituality. My contention is that looking backward to pre-modern mythology in this way provides larger frames of reference that are even more useful to contemporary Augmented Reality artists than they were to the graffiti artists of the 1980s that this essay was originally discussing, as the technological and artistic affordances of mobile devices have expanded the possibilities of street art to begin to match Burroughs’ vision.