AR: Augmented Reality

Art & Technology host Daniel Durning brings you into the world of AR, Augmented Reality, with artists Will Pappenheimer and Patrick Lichty, founding members of Manifest.AR. In this program they discuss the spectacular AR experience created by Pappenheimer for the 2014 Whitney Museum gala and an overlay of the deep VR/AR creations that Lichty has created and the article he published in the MIT journal Leonardo on the subject.

Proxy, 5-WM2A is Pappenheimer's virtual designer drug specifically commissioned for the 2014 Whitney Gala and Studio Party. 5-WM2A (with the “street name” Proxy) can be consumed by guests on their mobile devices and tablets, offering enhanced visionary powers—and a safe experience. As guests view their surroundings through the screen of their mobile devices, hallucinatory virtual elements are overlaid onto the physical environment. The augmented reality application uses these perceptual alterations of the real world to refresh the museum experience. Proxy has been designed as a "dissociative class” designer drug app that helps the Whitney community to leave behind and dissociate from its iconic Breuer location and transition to a new building. Like most designer drugs, Proxy is fashioned to mimic and improve on the effects of the real and at the same time to escape classification as a controlled substance—or, in this case, controlled museum experience. As an artwork Proxy, 5-WM2A is a humorous yet pointed exploration of our addiction to our technological devices, of the accelerated merger of virtual and physical worlds, and of the ways in which these factors change our perception.

Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn based artist working in new media, performance and installation with an interest in institutional or spatial intervention and the altered meaning of things. His work often explores the confluence or tension of the virtual and physical worlds. Individually and as part of the Manifest.AR collective he has exhibited in solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC, the ICA in Boston, Kasa Gallery, Istanbul, the DUMBO Arts Festival, Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles, Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, PA, Pace University and Pocket Utopia Gallery in New York. As a founding member of the Manifest.AR collective. He has participated in staging two highly publicized interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the 54th Venice Biennial.

Patrick Lichty is a conceptual artist, curator, and theorist exploring how media shape our perception of reality as well as the borders between the digital and the material. He is best known for his work with the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He has presented and exhibited internationally at numerous biennials and triennials (Yokohama, Venice, Performa, Maribor, Turin, Sundance), and conferences (ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Popular Culture Association, SLSA, SxSW). His recent book, Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Culture was released by the Institute for Networked Culture, and is included in the Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. He is a Lecturer of Digital Studio Practice at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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