augmented reality

This presentation, "Axolotls and Perfume Bottles", was delivered by Strickland and Luesebrink as part of the ELO 2017 panel, "Forms of Translation: Experimental Texts Rewritten As Migrations To Digital Media". Its ELMCIP record includes a PowerPoint file with extensive embedded movies, and the script for the presentation, both exactly as delivered.

The first portion discusses Regina Celia Pinto's work Viewing Axolotls, her transformation of Julio Cortazar's 1952 story "Axolotl", which she considers together with Gustavo Bernardo's book on Vilem Flusser.

The second portion discusses the transformations and migrations of the authors' work To Be Here As Stone Is from print to multiple digital incarnations. The perfume bottle referenced is associated with this poem in the print version of Strickland's True North.

As the script says, "If Viewing Axolotls outlines a path to the interior humid space of aquarium tank or nightmare brain--always crossing over into confined space--To Be Here As Stone Is traces a path that breaks out from the interior of a perfume bottle to a cosmic location."

[Archivist's note: the content presented at the conference was in PPTM (macro-enabled MS PowerPoint file) and DOC (MS Word) formats. To prevent the spread of malicious macros, neither of these formats may be uploaded to ELMCIP. Following the "translation" theme of this panel, I have therefore saved the PPTM as a PPT file, and the DOC as PDF, before uploading the attachments. I have checked that both still read/play as they were presented; if you prefer, you may download and re-convert them. As the slide presentation (56 MB) contains multiple video segments demonstrating the two works, please allow sufficient time for all elements to fully load. On certain slides the presence of video segments is indicated by a change to the cursor (and mentioned in the script).]

In this essay, Robert P. Fletcher demonstrates how, while putting together digital and print media affordances, augmented print may evoke in readers a sense of the uncanny. Fletcher also explains how works such as Amaranth Borsuk’s Abra (2014), Aaron A. Reed and Jacob Garbe’s Ice-Bound (2016) or Stuart Campbell’s Modern Polaxis (2014) seem to demonstrate the existence of a never-ending return of the “familiar” in electronic literature.

Oculus Rift virtual reality headgear is usually donned to kill dragons or multitudes of soldiers, to explore far off places and feel superhuman. But Pressman argues that the VR and augment reality [AR} work of Canadian digital artist Caitlin Fisher confronts expectations about digital media, games, and electronic literature by employing such technology to tell women’s stories and to pursue feminist storytelling. Pressman examines how Fisher’s AR work Circle (2012) embeds multimodal vignettes about three generations of women onto little domestic objects, which Pressman designates “feminism in action,” specifically in the aesthetic enactment of its female-centered subject matter and its formal glitch aesthetics. More specifically, Pressman aims to show how Circle performs the central concerns of Material Feminism: an investment in illuminating how materiality and context-based relationality are central elements of experience and meaning-making. This short work about women and things insists on the relationality of animate and inanimate objects and, in so doing, it provides an opportunity to critique such philosophical movements as Object-Oriented Ontology. Moreover, the ways in which Circle achieves this critique promotes investigation into the larger and more central intersections between the technologies of AR, VR and feminism.

Since the early 2000s, media artists have explored the potentials of location-based technologies, developing locative media projects “in which geographical space becomes a canvas” (Hemment 2006). Artists both within and without the locative field, such as Teri Rueb (USA), Blast Theory (UK), Jeremy Hight (USA), Janet Cardiff (Canada), Chris Caines (Australia) and Paul Carter (Australia) have developed creative works involving narrative, textuality and place-based storytelling within a site-specific context. In many of these works, real world spaces are annotated and augmented with a range of artistic contents – primarily audio and/ or textual – and mediated by mobile devices.

Certain earlier, pre-digital practices also involve the augmentation of real world spaces with cultural contents, such as various pilgrimage and walking practices involving the spatialisation of narrative and the virtual annotation of the world. These highly embodied and imaginative site-specific practices involve landscape operating as an interface to “an enhanced, symbolic world” (Czegledy 2005), involving “stories we can trace with our feet as well as our eyes” (Solnit 2001) and resonating with contemporary techniques of spatialisation, annotation and augmentation within digital contexts.

The paper will discuss my 2013 locative media work Notes for Walking (the space in-between time), a locative narrative / augmented reality work that was exhibited in the Sydney Festival 2013, a major Australian arts festival. Notes for Walking annotated 13 video notes (comprised of text, sound and moving image) to an abandoned naval fort at Middle Head on Sydney Harbour by using locative and AR technologies, and was experienced as a walked, locative work by audiences using their own smartphones and a free, downloadable project app. The project drew audiences of over 5000 people to Middle Head during the Sydney Festival period in January 2013, and was downloaded to over 2,600 mobile devices in this time.

Notes for Walking emerged from extended research into pilgrimage and related walking practices; in particular the 88 Temple Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku, Japan where the 88 temples ringing the island of Shikoku operate as a large-scale spatial narrative. The research revealed a complex, multilayered system of narrative spatialisation and annotated, augmented landscape within the Shikoku pilgrimage; including a straightforward annotative level in which temples are associated with miracle tales via oral history, and a more participatory, imaginative level in which haiku-like poems or go-eika – written in second person, present tense – act as specific textual triggers at each site, mediating the participant’s live experience of the landscape as a poetic and highly embodied technique of participation.

This research – and especially the discovery of the poetic device of the go-eika – provided a textual and creative framework with which I approached the conceptualisation and development of Notes for Walking. Given the large audience numbers and high level of participation in the festival, the approach appears to have proved engaging for contemporary audiences and may have relevance in a broader locative media and locative narrative context.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)