January and February in Scotland are, as a rule of thumb, pretty miserable. The weather rarely varies from grey skies and sleet, which is bitingly cold on your face and slippery under your feet. My tolerance for this kind of weather has hit rock bottom at a time when walking outside is the only feasible option for human interaction. Is stomping around the city shivering from the cold and being pelted with rain still a feasible option? Most days my answer is no.

This being said, Edinburgh has a habit of surprising you. I’ve been gifted with bright, fresh mornings and mercifully blue skies when I least expect it; sporadic pockets of sunshine that manage to lighten up my week before a prompt return of the typical grey ceiling. Last week there was a day like this – I downloaded Acute Art’s AR App, and went out alone.

Acute Art’s Unreal City project saw the company collaborate last year with artists and Dazed Media to create the UK’s biggest yet public festival of AR art. The Southbank located exhibition featured 36 sculptures and some big names, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Tomás Saraceno and Nina Chanel Abney amongst them. As of January 12th, and for one month only, Acute Art’s app brings Unreal City’s site-specific artworks to you – you can place them anywhere: in your kitchen; in your garden; on your dining table. I chose to take them with me on my walk, and spent some time placing my favourite artworks from the app’s selection, each of them new to me, into the green space that I know well and walk around often. As the short-lived sunshine faded, I used my phone to make Olafur Eliasson’s sun, first exhibited as the Weather Project in 2003, glare down on Edinburgh’s meadows. Brisk walkers cut home beneath a clouded sky; I could make the sun shine down on them again.

AR detects and reacts to real-world environments in real-time. Its technology places additional sensory details and information into reality, augmenting how we experience things and places that we see every day. Software that can do this has been around since the ‘90s: developed in a U.S. Air Force Lab in 1992 and used by NASA 6 years later, AR made its commercial debut in 2008, when it was used to enhance BMW’s print ads. Since then, it has danced a swift circuit through entertainment and advertising industries, a dance that reached a peculiar crescendo when Pokémon GO took the world by storm 2016. The game’s release is seminal in AR’s short history, and its popularity marked a massive engagement with the multidimensional experiences that technology can create. But where do artists fit in amidst the possibilities of AR?

Wikipedia is just about everybody’s first port of call, and the AR Wiki page has a visual art subsection that is decidedly scant. Artist, writer and digital media researcher Helen Papagiannis writes of artists and technology: ‘artists are often left out in the discussion of the advancement of new technologies, yet they are critical to the evolution of any new medium.’ Writing in 2017, she likens AR at this time to ‘cinema in its infancy, when there were as yet no conventions. AR, like cinema when it first emerged, commenced with a focus on the technology with little consideration to content.’ In 2021, it seems the opposite might be true. Caspar Thykier, CEO and co-founder of Zappar, told me that it is important to remember that AR is a facilitating technology, and is of little importance in and of itself. ‘Its value lies in how it’s used to engage its audience through the power of storytelling and creativity. Much like a television. A TV is really just a box in the corner of the room or hanging on your wall. It’s the content that appears on the 8k screen that makes it come alive. The same is true of AR.’

We have surely reached a point where the novelty of AR has worn off. LBB’s report blames Pokémon GO, claiming ‘everyone played Pokémon GO in 2016, and suddenly we all got AR.’ AR is no longer cutting edge: it is cheaper to create; it is easier to make and use; it has lost its aggressively futuristic sheen. Now that the medium no longer takes centre-stage, the emphasis is on content – and artists, makers and designers across the globe are rising readily to the challenge.

In his talk at the EurasiaGraphics Conference 2020, artist and director Can Büyükberber reminds us that digital displays are already an integrated part of public spaces and architecture. AR blurs the distinctions between physical and digital reality, and Can, whose own work is an open door to abstracted formations, claims this blurriness as a space for artists. ‘As artists and designers, we have the chance to be the architects of the future, and decide how the aesthetics and the interaction between digital and physical worlds are going to take place.’

In Caspar's words, AR is ‘a new way of thinking about spatial storytelling,’ and mass consumer adoption has boosted AR’s storytelling powers tenfold. The events of 2020 highlighted a deep and urgent need for education and social change, and notable here is the Movers and Shakers Monuments Project: it will entail ‘a catalogue of augmented reality monuments of women, people of colour and LGBTQIA+ icons.’ A Monuments Project App, launching in Black History Month 2021, will push for equitable representation in USA school curricula, creating a culturally responsive pedagogy ‘so that students of colour can see themselves in their history.’ It was nice to be able to make the sun appear, blazing, warm and close in an otherwise gloomy vista, but clearly moments like that only scratch the surface of what AR can do.

Like most things, AR can, and probably will, be politicised; but this technology is only as progressive, or as terrible, as the content it beholds. With applications and software such as ZapWorks, Eyejack, Artitive, ARART and Onirix, AR is more accessible than ever through smartphones and computers. The medium is no longer the message: artists, designers and creators are now central to the AR story. Unreal City and the Monuments Project are testament to the fact that our ability to create the things we want to see is, quite literally, in our hands - and good weather and monuments that don’t memorialise oppressors are certainly things we love to see.

Words: Alice Keeling

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