Today, hugging the rim of the 21st century, art is no longer just a canvas hung squarely on the wall. It’s more than that. It’s coming full circle and finding fresh life. The whole of art is barreling headfirst toward another new frontier; only this one is full of computer code.
Augmented Reality entered the scene during one of the most polarizing decades in history, the 1960s. As war, protests, sit-ins, and the hippie counterculture emerged, new and exciting advancements were being made on the tech front. The invention of AR will forever be wedged between the start of the now-famous Rolling Stone Magazine and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.
The computer scientist Ivan Sutherland developed an AR head-mounted display system during his time at Harvard. It was named The Sword of Damocles, after the legend where Dionysius, a nature god of the Greek Myths, invited Damocles to a banquet and seated him beneath a sword suspended from the ceiling by a thread. The headset offered a mixed reality by displaying computer-generated graphics.
AR began to expand as universities and large companies grabbed tight and ran with the invention. Early forms of the technology were used for military and aviation simulations where virtual data was placed over the physical environment.
Now, for the sake of this particular article, we have to leave 1968 and the decades that followed and jump backward into the past.
Interactive Art Before Augmented Reality
Interactive art is interesting because, on some level, humans have been interacting with art since the beginning. Since the days when we were painting on cave walls. However, in 2019, Barbara Ehrenreich published a piece in The Guardian about our current self-obsessed society and how the cave art of the Paleolithic Age didn’t put humans at center stage. The art, mostly of animals and wildlife, lived on cave walls, only to be painted over again and again.
There was an understanding of the impermanence of what we could imagine and a fair distance between the artist and the art.
Yet - as time catapulted forward and humans evolved, by the end of the 19th century, as George Fifield, founder of Boston Cyberarts, put it, everyone understood that the artist was in charge of making the art. By the end of the 20th century, just 100 years later, there was interactive literature, web art, interactive installation art in museums, and video games.
The definition of interactive art is art in which the viewer can participate, where their participation produces an outcome. Basically, it’s art that the viewer can play with in some form. While many definitions say that interactive art is always technological, George Fifield’s definition rings the truest – not all interactive art is technological, and not all technological art is interactive.
With interactive art, there is an element of chance. We don’t know what will happen when the viewer interacts. There is, in most cases, no set outcome.
John Cage, an American composer and visual artist, started to work with chance after studying Zen Buddhism and Eastern Philosophies. It was after discovering the I-Ching (Yijing), the Book of Changes - an ancient Chinese divination text that used a set of coins to come up with one of 64 possible hexagrams, all with their own meaning, that composed the solo piano piece titled Music of Changes. Written in 1951, it used the flipping of coins to determine the music’s pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and duration.
In 1963, Nam June Paik started experimenting with television as a medium for art, inspired by the German Happenings. His exhibition, The Exposition of Music - Electronic Television at the Gallerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, featured TV sets that viewers could interact with.
There was the piece, ‘Zen for TV,’ in which a viewer could meditate in front of the TV that Paik had turned on its side, which had a white line running down the middle of the screen.
There were other sets in what was called Parcipipation TV. Viewers could interact with each set to provoke different emotions and energy, making them active participants in the artistic experience.
As art and technology began to mix, there was an inherent need for the viewer to engage. Video games and video cameras became artistic outlets. This set the stage for what was to come with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, immersing the participant in the artwork itself.
Augmented Reality and Art Find Their Place
We left AR back with Ivan Sutherland and the beginning of its use by military and corporate entities.
