Gaze, the TV of Tomorrow and Augmented Reality

I installed Gaze last week for the TV of Tomorrow Show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As a work that views the viewer, juxtaposes intimacy and surveillance and evokes a specter of machine consciousness, I thought Gaze was fitting for the proceedings.

A conference for multi-platform interactive television, the TV of Tomorrow was mostly hyper corporate with talk titles like "Better Monetization through Better Counting: Measurement for Advanced TV and Video" and "Interactive TV Advertising: Who's Going to Click?" Art like my own was mostly there to legitimize that the conference was taking place in a center for the arts.

I did attend a handful of talks, the best being "Augmented Reality Meets TV." Clearly there is a bunch of innovative tech going on and a few advertising firms are applying it to web shopping applications, branding, and Facebook games.

Certainly the most interesting AR applications remain those for mobile phones. The ability to view mapping info (restaurant reviews, closest metro stops etc.) in the phone as augmented reality (AR) is exciting in the way that it creates new ways of presenting and interacting with information. AR mobile games and the idea of imbedding information in space via computer-vision recognizable printed graphics is the thing most desirable to me as artist.

The moderator was talking about AR as total immersion in a brand experience (which is a horrible way to frame it), but I think of it more as another increasingly fluid information exchange, more of a total immersion in information. This kind of interface allows for new forms and systems of user interface and interaction design, certainly a fun set of problems/possibilities.

In the faceless crowd of suits I met another artist, Keiichi Matsuda, a Masters of Architecture student at the University of London, who had been flown in for the event to show his brilliant video, which illustrates all the potential (lovely and hideous) of everyday use of AR.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

He explained to me later that his architecture group explores architecture through film. We had a stimulating conversation about theory, art, etc. I'll certainly be thinking more about post scarcity anarchism, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City and the composition of signifiers through time and space in film.