That talk by Kevin SlavinI enjoyed Kevin Slavin's Reality is Plenty, thanks. Great examples and a timely 'stirring up' of a scene that's perhaps a little too self-congratulating at times, one long in need of some healthy criticism as to its own 'real' cultural and historical contributions..I do have several issues with Slavin's core discontents however, a few of which I'll share here. firstly....it seems Kevin simply takes Augmented Reality a bit too seriously. He gives it far too much credit. He positions it as an invasive technology so powerful that it can somehow intervene between the Real and our experience of it, as though the two are at all separable.In 'reality' AR is still a rather clunky, young, occasionally useful, occasionally engaging screen experience. It is not a computationally mediated layer over the world. It's limited to -and dependent upon- an electrically powered device. The name we give this particular innovation comprises a pair of words similarly clunky when put together, Augmented Reality. Certainly they read as a rather ludicrous promise, like the great many names innovators and entrepreneurs have given their projects for centuries (the Magic Lantern anyone?). And it's the same promise that AR marketeers for all those numerous startups are pushing on us wholesale, that reality will never be the same. It seems Kevin believes the hype enough to take it on on those terms.. This is where the Terminator analogy that Kevin uses, one that keeps coming up again and again, is really not so useful, of the permanent informational overlay, the bolt-on Head Mounted Display. This is an idea born in fiction and now one of several extrapolated logical conclusions as to AR's end game; as though it's all about that anyway. Even if AR contact lenses and/or technology harvested from assassinating machines from the future come into play, we may find people prefer AR for what it already is. An optional way of experiencing, of reading a place we are already in. Give us the benefit of the doubt there Kevin! There are many ways of being, of being somewhere, and AR offers one particular approach. After evaluating which restaurants have free tables over the canal, you can put your phone back in your pocket and, sun on your face, smell the air looking for falafel instead.. There's no mandate to have your visual cortex wired up else revoke your citizenship, at least yet. Let's not pretend AR is all about a persistent visual layer producing a new and coherent reality. secondly....Kevin positions reality as a fixed, known substrate over which this layer abstracts (a common platonic reading of AR) especially in the context of our cities, of being somewhere. Again, the problematic term is taken too literally, of there being Reality and an interfering, somehow persisting, visual layer. Why should it really matter if a screen is placed somewhere within the complex process of reading or being in a place? Can't we enjoy many ways of being somewhere? Afterall, augmentation is happening anyway: a story about a place, perhaps hearing of a murder nearby, will quickly change your experience of being somewhere, how that place is read. He is mistaking the Medium for the Manipulation.Reality itself is a consensus born of countless little augmentations (..an AR experience may end up being just one of them). It's very difficult to say otherwise! One can see this in what I refer to as the 'AR effect', one that YouTube has significantly helped propogate. Countless thousands more people have watched videos about AR than have ever experienced it in person (it may always be this way) yet still a little of the 'magic' conveys. Why is this? Why do people tell me that watching my own levelHead video on YouTube gave them a tingle up their spine? People love the idea of the fictitious approaching the real, as though for a moment the two conjoin. Why is a video of what could equally be an After Effects or Cinema4D video inspiring for so many? Because it falls within the realm of experience, of what they believe can be experienced. thirdly..Criticising AR because it privileges the Visual is a bit weird: it's a predominantly visual medium after all (so far). Why should it be something else? Only AR startup marketeers position it as a new and complete reality, sufficient unto itself (as SGI did with VR in the mid 90's). In fact, Visual AR is just one expression, one implementation, of what we now refer to as an Augmentation.Expressing discontent at the ocular focus of Visual AR is like giving Painting a hard time because it denies the rich plethora of experiential possibilities afforded by audio, and that all paintings should ship with a small orchestra. All the while painting's have been 'augmenting reality' for centuries, changing the way people see the world, even their own faith.. Again, one shouldn't take AR too seriously. It's visual trickery, the latest in a long string of human projects popular not just because they're occassionally useful, but because they play with perception, transforming our endemic suspicion of its capacity to reliably convey the Real into an interactive and critical conversation with the visual faculty itself. No one's fooled that the British Monarchy is under attack by insects while looking at a giant AR cockroach gnawing on Buckminster Palace, on a tiny screen in the sunlight. We're playing with ourselves, just as audiences of Peppers Ghost did in the late 1800's, just as we still do now with the long lineage of optical illusion art: Perspectival Anamorphosis, Trompe-l'Oeil and more. It's just the beginning for this thing we call AR, a term that will be obsolete as fast as it becomes ubiquitous. AR doesn't threaten or dilute experience of the 'Real' any more than Virtual Reality has. It doesn't take away from Being in the World, in the broader phenomenological sense. It doesn't flatten or distill cities to a mere skin of reflective data. Remember all the VR-vs-Real discourse in conferences, humanities departments and countless books? We were supposed to be living inside TRON by now (personally, I feel quite robbed that I don't pick up the veggies on a LightCycle). finally.... As regards Augmentation more generally: we are already deeply augmented, and augmenting beings. Our Commons are plastered with proprietary imagery in the form of advertising designed to modify our relationship to certain objects, others and ourselves; our faces and bodies are wrapped, rehearsed, smeared, shaped, hidden, bound, painted and pierced. Our cities are ladened with informational and instructive signage designed to sit up like a billboard sprite on the road or as we come around the bend.Are these not overlays of a sort? Even if it does become indistinguishable as to whether AR, this computationally deployed 'talking skin' is happening on a wind-shield or on our contact lenses, rather than 'in the world', would it really matter? The visual, aural and olfactory cortices, our great and electric branches, are already our points of contact with the world, our interface. Even as Slavin spoke, arguing that the naked eye should be left naked, his own eyes were augmented by glasses. And I saw his eyes through them, perhaps smaller than they really are, through the photons my LCD display cast at my own. Thanks Kevin for kicking off a great discussion! Cheers, Julian Oliver |