FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Architects Create AR Artwork In Upstate New York

Hidden in the green pastures of Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, New York lurk digital shapes transforming the landscape.

In a field in upstate New York giant floating sculptural forms enhance the landscape, shimmering and hovering like alien vessels waiting to audition for the latest Roland Emmerich movie. But these towering structures can’t be seen with the naked human eye. Why? No, there’s no invisibility cloak at play here, and they aren’t mere figments of your imagination (but not by much)—they’ve been created in the virtual realm of augmented reality.

Sculptural AR—where artworks are created within the looking glass environment of virtual space—is in infant form, toddling around in that adventurous learning phase. No one really knows exactly what to do with AR—there are no rules, it’s not a movement, it has no manifesto, but it exists as an experimental platform and the more adventurous artists among us are intrepidly testing out its potential and limitations. Because of these experiments we have events like Peeling Layers Of Space Out Of Thin Air, curated by John Cleater and commissioned by Architecture Omi. It sees nine innovative architect firms—Acconci Studio, Asymptote, Cleater Studio, Kol/Mac, Metaxy, Leeser Architecture, Studio Daniel Libeskind, SHoP, and SITE—collaborate to create virtual sculptures and artworks for a group exhibition in Fields Sculpture Park at Omi International Arts Center, which opened over the weekend.

The medium of AR can already boast the largest sculpture on earth and this year saw guerilla AR pieces invade the Venice Biennial 2011 courtesy of, Manifest.AR. These works use trained architects to play around with augmenting a structure or a natural landscape, exploring the contours of physical reality by juxtaposing it with the virtual kind. The video above shows Kol/Mac’s What is Space, a floating, spinning body of digital water. Other artworks available to view through your phone include the patterns of the Siberian permafrost, a virtual garden, ephemeral space-absorbers, and other digital forms that curator John Cleater says make OMI the “locus of an unprecedented fourth dimension of fierce force that will continue to expand our understanding of space and time in the 21st century.”

The fourth dimension has characteristically been known as time, so we’re not sure what you’d call the veiled dimension of AR? Still, it’s good to see this sort of work being commissioned. Should you happen to be in Ghent you can view the art works using the Layar app, which’ll scan the site for QR codes, then reveal the works at their allocated plots.