Sunday, October 10, 2010

My iPhone Drawings in MoMA Augmented Reality Exhibition

This Saturday was a gorgeous summer-like day in New York. I was at the MoMA, anticipating the launch of the DIY Augmented Reality Art Invasion at 4pm. All that was needed was to figure out how to use Layar app. It took about 10 minutes of utter confusion, until the first signs of "it works!" appeared on my iPhone, in the room with Monet's Water Lilies.



The next hour and a half were spent roaming the museum and the atrium outside, discovering layers of virtual art galleries. My drawings were "attached" to the 5th floor, but technically could be viewed from any place inside and near MoMA by selecting the floor level within the Layar app. 


I was among 35 other artists who participated. I only met 2 while there, and one of them was Sander Veenhof, the mastermind / pioneer / curator of this exhibition. 


It's a very exciting experiment (well-executed, too) that has amazing potential. This exhibition opened my eyes to the idea of phychogeography.
"Developments in the field of phychogeography advance rapidly and radically. In former times the discipline required mental capabilities such as concentration and imagination, nowadays mobile phones provide us with easy-to-use viewing tools to percieve a multitude of fictive realities, anywhere we are, instantly. The technique causing this 'progression' is called augmented reality. It has led to an armada of virtual creativity of various kinds into our public physical space. Actually, AR has rewritten the scope of 'public space'. Physically walled private spaces, such as musea, are now open areas for anyone's objects and actions. To reflect on this and to investigate the implications for art intitutes, Mark Skwarek and I propose to infiltrate the MoMA with an augmented reality exhibition, curated and transmitted from a distance using GPS-driven Layer AR technology. A helpdesk will assist Conflux participants to collaborate and contribute a work to this "virtual DIY museum". ~Sander Veenhof (quote taken from conflux festival.org)

The 7 virtual MoMA floors will remain available/viewable permanently!

Instructions on how to see this virtual gallery: 

iPhone/Android: 
-Download (free) Layar Augmented Reality Browser app. 
-In your phone's general settings, make sure "location services" for Layar are "on". 
-Open the app, search for "art moma" and select "MoMA AR exhibition" 
 (Sander Veenhof / Mark Skwarek). 
-Open it, go to "settings": select "alternative positioning ON" / move "viewing range" to max / select floor
-My iPhone drawings are on the "5th-2D" level. 
-You can explore all the floors from any location within the museum. 

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