Visual Democratisation: AR and the Underpass Festival

This paper discusses the opportunities Augmented Reality (AR) offers art experiences to merge underused public spaces with cultural programming, establish communities, and influence urban development. It focuses on the issues of usability and accessibility necessary for the democratisation of the technology and uses Etic Lab’s current project in development, The Underpass Festival, as a model for speculatively testing these ideas. This structure exemplifies Etic Lab’s bottom-up approach to R&D that aims to align emerging technologies with issues surrounding social and cultural development. The Underpass Festival in Milton Keynes will constitute a study taking cues from groups of artists, the local community and publicly available data to propagate the use of AR in the built environment. It is scheduled to take place in Summer 2020. Our research currently extends to an on-going feasibility study to establish a route to ‘hanging’ artworks on the walls of public walkways. The festival aims to transform Milton Keynes’ iconic but underappreciated public spaces into the cultural real estate they were designed to be, and to develop a radical new democratic model for the role of art and galleries across the city, navigating the, “digital representations that reconfigure everyday experiences of place” (Feldman 2018), with little to no ‘visible’ footprint. We believe that software-based AR, the kind contingent on the existing technology people already carry around, should focus on accessible spaces repurposed as virtual sites for augmented reality implementation. It is our understanding that the suspension of disbelief that augmented and virtual reality play with is not limited to high definition visuality, and that the fidelity of the ‘reality’ presented should not be at the expense of its immediacy, accessibility and usefulness. These characteristics, for us, are the crux of visual democratisation and the basis of our research. Our feasibility study is, therefore, looking to the limitations of the existing technology available to the average member of the public: not as a route to developing the AR assets themselves, but instead as a means for the city and its inhabitants to begin mapping and reclaiming these particular sites. This paper will examine the issues of usability and democratisation of AR technology in relation to the Underpass Festival, and to what constitutes visual democratisation in the context of AR development. It will discuss the festival as speculative case study and work in progress, and its site-specificity. It will use the challenge of displaying artworks virtually in public spaces to consider the importance of visual quality relative to other attributes such as accurate mapping and ‘hanging’ on the underpass walls. It will conclude by comparing this project with some previous Etic Lab research around what we call the Oz Effect, and the impact of revealing ‘the man behind the curtain’, or the workings of the technology. It will examine this in relation to the aesthetics of the ‘poor image’.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Christian Tilt

Stephanie Moran

Alexander Hogan

Conference

Publication date: July 2019

Publication date (Print): July 2019

Pages: 198-205

Affiliations

[0001]Etic Lab

Frolic House, 23 Frolic Street,

Newtown, Powys, SY16 1AP, Wales

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2019.38

SO-VID: 4508cf7a-231f-4fef-9573-1c8bcd66c23e

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of EVA London 2019

Conference acronym: EVA 2019

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 8 - 11 July 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2019.38

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] 6D 2019 6D.ai https://www.6d.ai/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[2] 8th Wall 2019 Augmented Reality https://8thwall.com/index.html retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[3] T. Barrington 2018 Introduction to Digital Fingerprinting Etic Lab retrieved 22 February 2019 )

[4] J. BlighA. Bleakley 2006 Distributing menus to hungry learners: can learning by simulation become simulation of learning? Medical Teacher 28 606 613

[5] A. Hogan 2018 Real Friends and Meaningful Interactions Etic Lab retrieved 26 February 2019 )

[6] A. Horne 2016 Writing in Place: An “Ambient Literature” Project in the UK Publishing Perspectives https://publishingperspectives.com/2016/07/ambient-literature-launch/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[7] M. Kelly 2018 Microsoft secures $480 million HoloLens contract from US Army The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/28/18116939/microsoft-army-hololens-480-million-contract-magic-leap retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[8] M. LeachS. MaddockD. HadleyC. ButterworthJ. MorelandG. DeanR. MackinderK. PachN. BaxM. MckoneD. Fleetwood 2018 Recreating Sheffield’s Medieval Castle In Situ using Outdoor Augmented Reality

[9] N. Lomas 2018 Enterprise AR is an opportunity to ‘do well by doing good,’ says General Catalyst TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/enterprise-ar-is-an-opportunity-to-do-well-by-doing-good-says-general-catalyst/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[10] L. Matney 2019 Niantic reportedly raising $200M at $3.9B valuation TechCrunch retrieved 27 February 2019 )

[11] Milton Keynes Council 2019 Ambitious Growth http://www.investmiltonkeynes.co.uk/growth retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[12] J. Muncy 2019 Nintendo Labo Gets a Cheap VR Kit Wired retrieved 11 February 2019 )

[13] Oculus 2018 See it in VR feat Wiz KhalifaAdam LevineJonah HillLeslie JonesAwkwafina Oculus Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4eTJIbJYK4 retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[14] Nicholas PeresKnight 2019 Simulation Lab (TAaCT) Transtechnology Research http://www.trans-techresearch.net/research/research-projects/simulation-lab/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[15] D. Pierce 2015 Google Cardboard Is VR’s Gateway Drug WIRED https://www.wired.com/2015/05/try-google-cardboard/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[16] J. Rancière 2004 The politics of aesthetics Continuum London

[17] S. Savage 2016 Botifesto – How to think about Bots Computational Propaganda Project https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/public-scholarship/botifesto-how-to-think-about-bots/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[18] Sergiu (n.d.) #bringArtToLife Artivive https://artivive.com/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[19] B. Siwicki 2018 Next-gen telehealth: AI, chatbots, genomics and sensors that advance population health Healthcare IT News https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/next-gen-telehealth-ai-chatbots-genomics-and-sensors-advance-population-health retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[20] H. SteyerlF. Berardi 2012 Hito Steyerl: The Wretched of the Screen E-Flux New York

[21] M. Sullivan 2019 How the iPhone’s next 3D camera signals phase two in the AR race Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/90311285/apple-iphone-next-3d-camera-signals-phase-two-in-the-ar-race retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[22] F. Tepper 2018 Hands-on with Snapchat’s mediocre, crashy AR art TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/03/hands-on-with-snapchats-mediocre-crashy-ar-art/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[23] K. Tiffany 2017 How to put internet art in a book The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/1/16360410/molly-soda-interview-shared-digital-art-book-sara-sutterlin retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[24] T. Umali 2019 VR and AR study aims to treat chronic pain OpenGov Asia retrieved 18 February 2019 )

[25] F. Vogelstein 2019 Facebook’s Sloppy Data-Sharing Deals Might Be Criminal WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-sloppy-data-sharing-deals-might-be-criminal/ retrieved retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[26] S. Weis 2018 Your AR App Sucks - OR - The Current Sad State of Augmented Reality Packet39 https://packet39.com/blog/2018/03/14/ar-app-sucks-current-sad-state-augmented-reality/ retrieved 17 March 2019 )

[27] S. WooleyD. BoydM. BroussardMade 2016 How to Think about Bots Motherboard Vice https://motherboard.vice.com/enus/article/qkzpdm/how-to-think-about-bots retrieved 17 March 2019 )

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