Post-human Narrativity and Expressive Sites: Mobile ARt as Software Assemblage

Abstract

Experimental art deployed in the AR medium is contributing to a distinctly twenty-first-century reconfiguration of traditional perceptions of art, audience participation, and technological experience. This chapter examines an influential selection of experimental mobile augmented reality Art [ARt] in order to explore the progressive conceptual and ethical threads that are emerging from this relatively new but powerful cultural form. Using the concept of the ‘software assemblage’, the author traces the movement of AR beyond its native root system in the industrial, entertainment, and the engineering worlds, and toward the rhizome of radical practice that has come to define mobile ARt. A number of artists, critical engineers, theorists, historians, and participants to AR experiences, have in recent years been contributing to the emergent field of mobile ARt, and significant advances have been made. Clearly, this book is one of them. In the context of the second edition, the author posits the software assemblage concept as an alternative and relational modality through which to converse with ARt.