TV BUG (AR): AR Marker pinned @ the Lionel Groulx Metro Station , Montreal, QC, Canada

TV BUG & TV BUG (AR) 

As a child I’d spend countless hours observing and tracking insects – grasshoppers, ants, butterflies – in a field behind my house. I was fascinated with their hidden and mysterious worlds. They occupied the same space I did and yet seemed distant and alien. They went about their day to day rituals almost indifferent to my existence until of course our paths converged. I remember one such occasion, when running through a field, my presence triggered a chain reaction, one in which hundreds of grasshoppers suddenly leaped forward in escape.

Of course our relationship to insects and their seemingly invisible world, colors our perceptions and experiences in profound and uncountable ways – from real life encounters to metaphors about our fears and problems.

We readily appropriate insects – their form, actions and seemingly alien-like existence – for use in the science fiction and horror movie genres:  or to define an error, failure or fault in a system or program, as in ‘a computer bug’: or in terms of our health, ‘there’s a bug going around’. Of course there’s also reference to the invisible insect world in relation to surveillance – planting of ‘bugs’ to eavesdrop on unsuspecting participants or more recently, the military development of Cyborg Insect Drones for surveillance purposes.

The intent of ‘TV BUG’ is to reference some of these appropriations in a very indirect and abstracted way. In so doing ‘TV BUG’ also addresses the relationship we form to the space/s we occupy and move through. How is such a space/s referenced and identified? How is it contextualized in relationship to ourselves? Is such a space/s experienced through repetitive familiarity, social conditioning and/or memory?

It could also be argued that there seems to be interplay of five distinct, yet inter-related worlds or spaces, which exist today in our ‘real’ world experiencing of space. They are:  Insect Space (our relationship to the invisible world of insects); 2D Space (our interaction with screens – TV/Cinema/Computer…); Digital Space (our socio-political interactions with coding and software); Physical Space (the space we occupy and move through) and lastly, AR Space (the way in which mobile technology have begun to augment our reality and our relationship to all these other spaces).

The visual and audio footage which make up ‘TV BUG’ were appropriated from five different sources: David Attenborough – Life in the Undergrowth (BBC 2005); V/H/S (Magnet Releasing 2012); Ashes to Ashes (BBC 2008); Three hours and 19 minutes of 4×3 snow (YouTube); The Sound of Cicadas – Amazing Noise of Dense Cicadas (YouTube), and Êt $1 Øn &”¥ më∏àît èÑ∫!n ¿ (Nocturno Motoculto).

And lastly, ‘TV BUG’ was developed in conjunction with ‘TV BUG (AR)’. ‘TV BUG (AR)’ is a public space intervention using Augmented Reality (AR) mobile technology to pin selected video sequences from ‘TV BUG’ to specific GPS locations in and around Montreal, Canada. Access to and the experiencing of these augmented sequences is via any smart device (phone, pad, and tablet).

War of the Worlds Revisited (in progress) created and presented @ Musitk (Montreal): June 30, July 01, 2012

Inspired in part by Orson Welles ‘The War of the Worlds’ radio drama broadcast. The original broadcast was aired via The Mercury Theatre and CBS on Halloween night – October 30, 1938. The episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds.

In this AR (Augmented Reality) adaptation, we – hack space – and explore the power of media as an intervention to alter and augment the participants reality at any given moment – especially if the media’s content is experienced out of context.

Created by John Naccarato and Shereen Soliman

War of the Worlds Revisited (in progress) created and presented by John Naccarato and Shereen Soliman @ Musitk (Montreal): June 30 – July 01, 2012

I should explain what we did first. We stopped random strangers on the street and asked them to express themselves vocally – in a sort of sing-song way – which we then recorded. We then created colored music notes which were assigned to each voice.

Both the images and voices were uploaded and processed via an (AR) Augmented Reality open source processor which allowed us to define certain GPS trigger points in and around Eastern Bloc where the event took place. So visitor/participants were able to use their smart phones to scan the space, locating predefined GPS points which in turn would trigger the music notes and their associated sounds: the voices of strangers previously recorded.

Projet Chorale was developed as part of a larger project which is still in development and which intends to create a public intervention between ‘Artists’ and the ‘Public’ so that they may interact and critique issues surrounding Public Space. The thematic wrapper or entry point for the project will be notions of ‘Intimacy’.

The term “Artists’ within the context of this project signifies anyone involved in any singular disciple and/or inter/multi/trans-disciplines. An underlining objective of the project is to explore and examine the emerging technology of Augmented Reality (AR), and how such a technology may be situated as a new means of expression, in order to create a new potential for interventionist and expressive practices.

The project is also very interested in any works and theories which are pushing the boundaries of creative and expressive thought and how this could be implemented with AR. Some such possible intersections may include any combinations of these disciplines: Visual Arts, New Media, Performance, Sound, Text, Dance, Animation, Social Sciences, Political Sciences, Physical Sciences, Fashion, Design, Technology, Bio-Technology, Media, Social Media, Phenomenology, etc.

wiki.musichackday.org/

i Believe | John Naccarato | AR Public Intervention Project | 2011 – Ongoing | Montreal, QC, Canada

During the first half of 2011, I looked at the potential of Augmented Reality mobile technology (AR) for creating awareness around issues of public and private space.  The project ‘i Believe’ came into existence in part due to a previous project ‘Intimacy in Public Space: Site Specific Performance & Interventionist Work with New Media’ in which I and fellow artist (Sarah Nesbitt) had curated during the Art Matters Festival (Montreal, 2007) The project had involved a series of performance-based interventions where artists were asked to create intimate moments between themselves and the public questioning notions about intimacy or lack thereof, within public spaces.

With ‘i Believe’, the focus became the alarming escalation of condo developments in Montreal which I felt was gutting the cultural and social infrastructure of the city. This rise in condo development seemed to be catering to a small niche of the population with no clear philosophy by its developers as to their impact on the neighbourhoods and the city itself. Furthermore, Montreal’s condo development had triggered a mass gentrification of low income rental and historic areas.

I decided that perhaps the best way to approach this issue would be to create a psychogeographical study, one which could help critique and understand how major shifts in a city’s infrastructure affects memory, identity and ritual play. As a tool, AR was perfect since it allowed for virtual objects such as text, sound, 2D/3D image and video to remain hidden in public space until participants were made aware of their presence.

One example of the project ‘i Believe’, was where text was used as an AR object to trigger awareness of a particular green space being used as a public throughway. The text was only visible through the use of a smart device (mobile phone/pad/tablet) and only when participants were near the general area. Via their smart device participants could witness a six foot high black text ‘i believe’ intersecting onto the path which appeared to be blocking their way. Even though the text was virtual and overlaid onto the physical space being viewed, the text’s apparent real presence was powerful and profound.

Perhaps for me the most important aspect of such an AR interaction was how one’s action leaves behind an intimate trace or memory imprint which can be shared with others. It creates a very private moment in a highly public space. Of course the inverse is true when a large block of concrete and mortar – a condo – stands in your way, negating any form of intimacy or public interaction.

Some questions which arose from the project were:

1.  How does the experiencing of the AR event affect or alter the participant’s relationship to that specific space? Can the existence of the AR text affect the space even without the participants’ awareness of its existence?
2. Does the participant carry the residual memory imprints of that specific experience with them, so that if they return to the specific place, they remember the experience – even if they no longer see the object?

by John Naccarato

A group of 42 artists including myself took up the call by organizers - artists Mark Skwarek from New York and Sander Veenhof from the Netherlands - to create an AR Augmented Reality Intervention on the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in NYC on October 29, 2010. website

The experimental exhibition is part of the Conflux Festival, the annual New York festival dedicated to the psychogeography practice. With the exhibition, the organisers 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 a situation with an even increasing fragmentation of realities to be perceived individually? (http://www.sndrv.nl/moma/index.php?page=press)

Reviews: WIRED – Beyond the Beyond (EN) | Creators project | NY Times |