This is a continuation from On Art & Reality I, found here.

“Reality is our canvas; digital is our brush.”

This is a new mantra we’re trying on for our team. What does it mean?

In the mixed reality (“MR”) art world, we see “reality” as a spectrum. But this is not “reality” in the psychic, mind-bending-substance kind of spectrum that separates sanity from insanity. Rather, the MR spectrum was first outlined academically by Paul Milgram as the “Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” One far edge of the spectrum described Descartes’ IRL (In Real Life )Reality: blood-and-meat space; analog; Biblical times. The other end of the spectrum described the purely digital built environment that replaces everything you see, hear taste, etc.; VR headsets; virtual worlds; the Matrix Reality.

In between exists Augmented Reality, where our view of the IRL is modified, added to, augmented, by digital artifacts. This can be on mobile phones, looking through the camera as if you were video recording the world, and seeing (in near-real-time, 60 fps) new digital creatures, new pathways, new people even, appearing in your view of meatspace and maybe even interacting with the IRL objects like trees, chairs, or doorways. In the near future, this “performance” happens on AR glasses so that our fatiguing and waning arm muscles don’t get stressed by the ever smaller and thinner mobile devices we call our personal assistants, née iPhones.

“Reality as canvas”

Using Augmented Reality technologies, we superimpose digital constructs into a particular view of the IRL World. Reality is the stage upon which we draw our scene. It is the canvas on which we draw our pixels.

Typically, this is done in specific locations. For instance, in an upcoming launch with JW Marriott in Anaheim California, we have built 3 steel sculptures and installed them on the West Garden Deck of the hotel. The 3 sculptures represent the 3 stages of the life of a plant — seed, sapling, tree. You need not be a guest of the hotel to experience the performance — if in the area, please visit and look for our installation Shimé. But remember, the sculptures are just Phase 1 (the built artifacts) of this experience.

Using the dedicated Shimé mobile app on your iPhone, if you point your camera at the sculptures, previously static and rigid steel becomes fluid moving flora. In each of the 3 stages of the narrative, the audience member can interact with the digital experience to ultimately create their own unique digital tree to live amongst the garden. And as long as the guest returns over time to nurture their tree (by performing their unique meditation), their tree will continue to grow there. This is all done digitally, superimposed on the guest’s view of our sculptures through their phone’s camera. This is Phase 2 of our experience — the interactions by the audience to generate new art that is dynamic, evolving over time as more people contribute their digital trees to our digital forest.

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Phase 3 is when the guest discovers that by interacting with the art — by generating their own personal digital tree to live on the JW Marriott deck — they have actually participated in a performative meditation. KARMA SEED requires calm focus, to hover over a seed of your choosing, floating in the center of the ouroboros. From the negative space of the eternal (the ring of the sculpture), we draw a singular experience to be embodied into. VITARKA SAPLING requires studied learning, like the figurative right hand of the Buddha pinching the lotus blossom. This edification happens with attentive exploration of the digital flower, and requires the student to choose the mantra that resonates with them. Finally, in PIPAL PORTAL, the guest physically walks through the sculpture of the tree; the portal is in the shape of a woman doing yoga’s tree pose and becoming the tree. By participating in our meditative installation, the guest has digitally created a tree that embodies not just their interactions, but is a figurative embodiment of their experience. This is a transformative meditation living in a zen garden in Anaheim. This is Reality as a canvas. But our real art is our audience, and can we transform them, augment them, by simply encouraging them to step into our river?

This is not a commercial for a pending launch. We simply outline the components here to explain how IRL Reality is the setting for our art and how we view interactive art living in the real world. Our next installation is a digital performance in mid-town Manhattan. Previous ones occurred in Moscow, Geneva, Perth, Miami, St Louis, San Diego, San Francisco — quite literally, “All the World’s a Stage” and we draw our quill via Unity3D.

Source: https://arvrjourney.com/on-art-reality-ii-4de7538fd6d3?source=rss—-d01820283d6d—4