ABSTRACT
This chapter will investigate a set of artistic and activist augmented reality (AR) projects that in various ways revolve around the curation of urban, public, and institutional spaces. These projects demonstrate intersections between principles of design, mobile design, and performative cartography, and urban curation—principles that we can recognize in various art projects that aim to intervene into the set infrastructures of public space, experimental forms of curation making use of AR technology, or projects that hack into institutionally embedded forms of “on-site” museum exhibition.
What these different projects share, beside the use of AR technologies, is their experimentation with the affordances of this technology for a mobile, spatial curation that blurs the boundaries between the art project and the wider contours of public and/or institutional space, and also fundamentally reconfigures the relationship between these parameters and the viewing subject. Through a comparison of different forms of curatorial ARtivism—or experimental and activist mobile media curation by means of AR technology—various archival, architectural, and cartographic principles of this navigational AR-based curatorial design can be discerned.
This chapter examines several artistic and/or activist AR projects from the early years of the medium, as well as more recent projects—making use of various digital but also analog AR technologies—alongside a few iconic AR interventions in the exhibition spaces of institutions such as MoMA, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—whether endorsed by these institutions or “unauthorized.” With these archival, architectural, and cartographic principles of curatorial ARtivism in mind, we can begin to see a body of work that is as variegated as it is experimental, yet one that not only represents a significant genre of mobile media art, but also fundamentally redefines existing institutional principles and categories of art curation.
