Following a series of workshops for selected artists held in December, run by The Photographers' Gallery in partnership with curator Zaiba Jabbar (HERVISIONS), we have commissioned six new Augmented Reality works.
The final works will be launched monthly on The Photographers' Gallery website and social media from May 2022.
Each commission will also be supported by a series of one-to-one online guidance sessions with established curators and AR artists from the Open Space programme.
Better than Doraemon’s Anywhere Door, a portal filter promises to stitch together real and virtual worlds. Playing with immersive nature of AR, this work highlights the spectator’s willing suspension of disbelief to contemplate the seeming limitlessness of digital realities against its self-contained boundaries.
XRiS-00222 explores the entanglements of the metaverse with the meatspace to reflect on how augmented reality filters can become means of connecting with archived digital identities encapsulated within these digital media. This interactive experience, through a sonic narrative and augmented reality filter, opens a communication portal between a visitor and a cyberwitch avatar. The audience then takes part in exploring an intimate story, as the cyberwitch reflects on cyborgism, the archive as a sanctuary and spiritual technology.
Afrogenesis is an adaptation of three different short stories from ‘Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2001)’, in the form of Augmented Reality filters.This artwork is a love letter to black science fiction, as well as providing the opportunity for a new generation to discover and fall in love with these stories.
Garden of Elowan is a speculative virtual installation imagining a future in which nature has fused with digital technology. Inspired by cyborg botany, the work will immerse visitors into a fantastical realm housing a collection of futuristic plant species & exploring themes of digital sentience, speculative evolution, and the post-digital landscape. Garden of Elowan seeks to playfully question the blurring boundaries between what we experience as ‘real’ and ‘natural’ in an increasingly digitised world.
Beautified-AI speculates the impact of fabricated internet user profiling, forming these AI-generated portraits into complex, digitally woven live beings. The project establishes a community for these AI-generated profiles where rather than using the technology as a commodity in order to take advantage of deep fake techniques, the synthetic beings are characterised as complex and layered within the virtual environment. Beautified AI debates the role of synthetic AI imaging, using AR technology to politicise these fabricated profiles.
