Putting the Art in AR. ART+COM

Let's take a moment, if we may, to back up from the pure tech aspect of Augmented Reality, and look at it from the artistic side. We know AR is likely to be around a while, but do we want it to all be "talk bubbles"? Of course not. To give the Digital Art Layer a more concrete permanence (ironic, I know), we can't forget to add art to the augmented layer.

To that end, if you don't know him/them already, I'd like to introduce you to Joachim Sauter , the Founder and Director of Design at Art+Com, a design house for interactive media. They have some visually stunning projects going on.

The video from The Creators Project must be seen to truly appreciate the art.

From The Independent: "His work covers everything from technologies including augmented reality, (dinosaurs in the Berlin’s Natural History Museum becoming digitally fleshed out through the use of cameras and 3D modelling software), to mixtures of digital and physical reactions; one of the most impressive of his examples was a Tokyo installation in which the footprints of participants go from ripples of LED lights to physical waves on a nearby water feature. Much of it has to be seen to be believed (perhaps proving his point), but the central argument of much of work is the same: that we’re in the midst of a digitally-enabled ‘renaissance of the space’, as the talk was titled."

It's my personal hope that the creativity and ideas, such as fostered at ART+COM do indeed filer over to the Augmented Layer in AR, because AR serves as a potentially explosive art medium, given the chance. Yes, AR needs it's technicians, (artists of another sort, really), but who will paint the unseen?

Go, and see.