Guerrillas and Galleries: The Transformative Effect of Augmented Reality Art

You can appreciate art just about anywhere. You can find it in books, online, on the street, even in your home if you are a collector. However, purists often prefer to see it on display in galleries, where of course, it is also accessible to casual visitors, students, and organized groups. It’s not surprising therefore that a gallery is where you are most likely to come across an augmented reality art display. An AR art display can either comprise works of art created specifically for viewing with AR software, or a collection of conventional art enhanced by AR. The latter is the most common form currently, though more and more artists are experimenting with AR art, which we will cover a little later in this article. 

First, let’s turn our attention to the enhancement of existing traditional or modern art. Galleries and museums, art collectors, and artists alike are transforming their exhibits into interactive and informative displays that offer increased engagement for visitors. They are aided in their ventures by a crop of new augmented reality art (ARt) apps such as Artivive, which make it easy to create AR art experiences. As evidence that ARt solutions are in demand for this purpose, it’s worth noting that since launching in 2017, Artivive has been downloaded more than 60,000 times, as revealed by the company’s CEO, Codin Popescu, in an interview for a recent Forbes article. 

For gallery goers, the dream of getting face-to-face with the world’s most famous works of art can be hard to realize, especially on a limited travel budget. However, the next best thing might be to see those works in a local gallery, as Los Angeles art lovers were able to do at the Smart Objects Gallery for a month in 2017. Chadwick Gibson, the gallery’s director and an artist himself, came up with the idea of creating 3D models from photographs of famous works and generating dynamic QR codes to place throughout the exhibition space. As visitors tour the gallery scanning the markers with an AR art app, the pictures and sculptures materialize on their device screens. Each piece can be viewed naturally, as the device-user pans the camera around, observing the virtual paintings from any angle and walking around the virtual sculptures. The effect is breathtakingly realistic, which is perhaps why, as Gibson explained in an interview, visitors would physically jump up and down and applaud when viewing the augmented exhibits. 

In some cases, augmented reality is not just transforming art, it is revolutionizing, or perhaps democratizing it. One group of guerrilla artists for example, took over the Jackson Pollock exhibition room in the New York Museum of Modern Art, overlaying several Pollock paintings with their new artistic creations and providing a downloadable app for visitors to the museum. The augmented reality layers, created by the guerrilla group that calls itself MoMAR, comprise images, animations, and even games that are related to the virtually hijacked Pollock works. Of course, the original paintings remain physically untouched, merely serving as markers enabling the app to launch the virtual artwork. 

MoMar created its unofficial exhibition without permission from the museum, and although the establishment’s management has declined to comment about the exploit, neither did it take any steps to shut down the guerrilla artists' unsponsored exhibition, which MoMar claimed was a statement against exclusivity and elitism in the world of art. One of the exciting points about augmented reality art that MoMAR demonstrated is that it can be displayed anywhere, and does not need to be secured under lock and key or made subject to specific viewing times and other restrictions. 

Having now explored how augmented reality transforms the way art is displayed, we’ll move on to look at AR as an art form in itself, and some of the artists who instead of adding to or enhancing existing works, are dedicating themselves to the creation of art for ARt’s sake. Given the ability to create in 3D and to animate AR graphics, artists working with augmented reality are rarely content to create static pieces, as highlighted by the earlier examples of animated murals. Instead, they like to create captivating, living displays that intrigue and immerse viewers in multisensory experiences. 

Anyone would forgive a visitor to Josue Abraham’s Virtualidades exhibition back in 2015 for thinking the sculptures on display were unfinished because, physically at least, it was true! To see the complete works of art, the visitors would have had to use an app built using Metaio, a now-defunct augmented reality platform. 

Upon scanning the various sculptures with the app, gallery visitors were treated to an otherworldly experience, as fairies ran and flew about the room, robot arms sprang from the walls, and broken mannequins became whole and started to move.

Some ARtists, as they are coming to be known, like to use their blend of talent and technology to pay tribute to those who inspired them, like Eduardo Kobra, a notable street artist from Brazil, who has embellished the wall of a Miami restaurant with a vast mural. The mural features a vibrant portrait of surrealist Salvador Dali, which is masterful enough to turn the head of any passer-by. However, those in the know can view the image in a completely different way, as an AR layer makes the scene come to life when scanned. A colorful butterfly emerges from the mural, and as it does so, Dali’s eyes begin moving to follow its path and then roll excitedly as the insect comes to rest, ultraviolet wings extended, on his face. 

For those who would prefer to take their art at home with their coffee, augmented reality art books might be more appealing than urban murals. If so, Prosthetic Realitycould make for an ideal first step into the world of augmented reality art appreciation. Prosthetic Reality is a book containing augmented reality artwork by 45 different artists, spanning a range of styles and techniques from hand-drawn sketches to complex 3D animations, and everything in between. The artists used an app called Eyejack to create the AR element of the illustrations in the book, and the same app is required to view them, but that presents no difficulty, as it is available free from App Store and Google Play.