AR in MoMa
October 4th, 2010 By Michael Nitsche
You all got the email from Jill, but this is another nice twist to things to do; even though it is mainly doing a museum in a museum, which is a bit obvious unless one totally subverts this …
On Saturday October 9th, the physical space inside the MoMA NY building will host a virtual exhibition occupying all floors (including an additional virtual 7th floor) in parallel to the ongoing show. The show will not be visible to regular visitors of the MoMA, but those using a smartphone application called “Layar Augmented Reality browser” (available for free in the iPhone app store and Android market) will be able to see additional works on each of the floors, put there using a location-based augmented reality technique. The show will test case Augmented Reality art within an appropriate critical context: the bastion of contemporary art, MoMA.
So far, the MoMA is not involved in all this yet. But that’s not a requirement anymore anno 2010, being independent by using AR. The experimental exhibition is part of the Conflux Festival, the annual New York festival dedicated to the psychogeography practice. The organizers of the event, augmented reality experimentalist Sander Veenhof from the Netherlands, and Mark Skwarek, new media artist from New York, 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 do not claim the available exhibition space but instead they call out all ‘AR artists’ worldwide to place their virtual artworks within the walls of the MoMA (location: lat/lng 40.761601, -73.977710) too on the 9th of October. Since the exhibition happens in virtual space, there’s no reason not to host and endless amount of parallel virtual exhibitions there on that date.