Late last year there was a call for works for a Guerrilla art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The call was the brainchild of Sander Veenhof, an unofficial exhibition which had no ties to MoMa. The exhibition of works would be enabled by the use of Layar, an augmented reality browser for mobile devices which would with the aid of gps position and overlay art works within live videos of the space. The following is a selection of works by Sander employing augmented reality as a tactic to invade spaces well known, spaces which are the spaces of contemporary arts elite, public and highly controlled or spaces of power, private and highly secured.

Guerrilla exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York (images above and video below) is the exhibition mentioned above.

The show will test case Augmented Reality art within an appropriate critical context: the bastion of contemporary art. The organizers of the event…aim to address a contemporary issue caused by the rapid rise of Augmented Reality usage. What is the impact of AR on our public and private spaces? Is the distinction between the two fading, or are we approaching the contrary situation with an ever increasing fragmentation of realities all to be perceived individually? Being uninvited guest users of the MoMA space themselves, Veenhof and Skwarek call out any AR artist worldwide to place their artworks within the walls of the MoMA too on the 9th of October (Lat/lng: 40.761601, -73.977710). Since the exhibition happens in virtual space, there’s no reason not to host and endless amount of parallel virtual exhibitions.

Below is a video of Tamiko Thiel’s work Art Critic Matrix shown in the exhibition.

infiltr.AR (images above and video below) is a virtual infiltration into the White House and Pentagon in America.

two virtual (AR) Twitter balloons have been positioned inside the Oval Offica and inside the Pentagon press room. The balloons can be seen ‘for real’ inside these two locations, but elsewhere in the world, an ‘artist impression’ can be viewed…The balloon displays the latest tweet containing either the hashtag ‘#pentagonchat’ or ‘#ovalofficechat’.

Turbine Hall 3D Controller (image below) is currently showing as part of an exhibition Gradually Melt the Sky at the Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn New York. The work is part physical device at the gallery and part augmented reality work ‘placed’ in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. Users at the exhibition can control the device which causes the augmented reality part, a giant disco ball, to react in real time.

Tension by Eva Schindling is a cloth held under tension by eight motor units which is connected to a number of RSS feeds on the internet.

The analysis of several news-feeds on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in nowadays world [sic] provides the input for those motors that pull and release the hooked membrane. A constant interplay between opposing forces produces movement, deformation and destruction of the material.

To see more network related works by the same artist see Txt-Me-1st.

Bruce Sterling who wrote the foreword for REFF RomaEuropa FakeFactory gets his hands on the publication for the first time and tests out the various tags:

It’s interesting to watch as Bruce wrote Shaping Things five years ago about these very same technologies and scenarios. In a very real sense he is watching his predictions come true.

REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory published in Italy by DeriveApprodi and FakePress has just come out this month with some of my work in it. Yes any publication of my work is a good thing but I’m particularily proud of this one due to it being a connected/augmented publication which has used free/open culture software right through its creation, publication and how the end user interacts/reads the publication.

The publication has been published with the byline:

The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.

however is itself a reinvention of what a ‘book’ such as this can be and do these days through combinations of innovative new/print media, tags of various types, augmented reality and pervasive networks. Building this publication has from the start been a collaborative process between the editorial team and contributors (artists, writers etc.) who could, through a wordpress website and a plugin designed specifically by Fakepress (more info on that here) for this style of next generation collborative publishing, constantly add to/amend/correct and ultimately compile the book as a print ready pdf for publication from the site. Now, post-publication, the website is part (the online part) of the finished book but the site has also been the ‘site’ of collaborative networking to make this very forward thinking publication happen.

The publication is essentially in three parts;

1. The print version (available here).
2. The website.
3. The iPhone/iPad app (click here to download via iTunes).

The print version contains Fiducial Markers and QR Codes. The Fiducial Markers can be used to view extra augmented reality content on the website via a computer with a webcam (click into the section Augmented Reality). The iPhone/iPad app can be downloaded and used to access the QR Codes. These connect to online multimedia including extra texts, music, videos, photos and maps of the book’s contents/authors.

The image above shows me using the augmented reality section of the site with one of the Fiducial Markers featuring my work (I don’t have a copy of the book yet so I had to improvise with a marker on my iPhone).

Above a screenshot of the iPad app and below a Flickr slideshow of the iPad app in use at the preview launch of the publication at the Share Festival, in Turin, Italy.

An innovative book of course needs an innovative foreword and who better than Bruce Sterling to write it:

Right now, the behaviors and activities commemorated in this book are bizarre. Very. They are so peculiar that they are inherently difficult to describe, because they come from the outer reaches of an emergent network-culture…Basically, they resemble the activities of time travellers. Time travellers don’t actually exist. However, they can be hypothesized. They can be faked. Time travellers would be people among us who come from a different historical epoch. By their nature, they have a different set of attitudes and expectations from our own. Time travellers would be people behaving differently, and also effortlessly. They are not being perverse, arcane or difficult. The time travellers have just as much custom and logic as we do. Their behavior would make perfect sense some day. Only, not just yet.

Read the full foreword here.

More works with a textual/language theme. SMSlingshot by VR/Urban is

an autonom working device, equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in the also [sic] wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a colored splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered – just in case.

For similar work see The Media Cartridge, TXTual Healing, Light Attack and The Artvertiser.

Originally seen on Networked_Performance.