Augmented Reality in Art: Aesthetics and Material for Expression

Abstract

Cinematic Apparatus theory of the 1970s set the stage for an investigation of cinematic expression in avant-garde film art through a deconstruction of its materials. The material and production elements repressed in the normal ideological apparatus became the arena for new expression. Cinema accelerated the mechanization and sequence of its era to create the essential medium of that era; Augmented Reality is a similar acceleration of the electric image that first emerged with electric video installation. Using Jean-Louis Baudry’s diagram of the cinematographic apparatus as reference, this essay excavates and diagrams the electric image apparatus to search out the repressed and revealed in viewers’ perception. For AR, the first medium which fully realizes the electric image, a new way forward is proposed, towards an avant-garde AR(t).