Augmented reality artworks have already begun to gatecrash our reality, invading our lives (and museums) via smartphone apps. Lying there in wait, present but unseen, their intangible existence is only confirmed through the looking glass of a mobile phone. The Boston Cyberarts Festival starts on April 22nd, which, among other things, will host a series of augmented art works that will be located virtually across the city’s Innovation District.
One of the pieces will be Mark Skwarek's Occupation Forces (above), which will see an alien invasion taking place in an alternate augmented universe, transforming part of the city into a sci-fi film with extraterrestrials running amok in Boston’s public spaces, revealing an unfolding narrative. Let’s hope they’re benevolent and don’t have corrosive blood, or anything that would require a squad of hardass space marines to handle. As well as this, interventionist public art collective Manifest.AR will create virtual exhibitions in and around the Institute of Contemporary Art, using augmented reality app Layar to “beam” art works—like psychedelic AR toads and AR minimalism—onto people’s devices.The scope for this sort of artwork is huge, both figuratively and literally, this digital otherworld being a place of near infinite cyberspace (something that was amply demonstrated by Sander Veenhof’s enormous AR sculpture Biggâr). So expect to experience much more of it lying concealed in the virtual spaces of our cybernated world as augmented reality exhibitions become an ever more prominent (and free) place to showcase digital art.
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