AR in AK

Guest Post by Nathan Shafer

There are just a few hours left to pledge to literally the coolest AR piece in the world! And by cool we mean glacial!

I am in the process of virtually reconstructing the former termini at Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. That is right outside of Seward, Alaska. about 100 miles from Anchorage. It is one of the most amazing places on this planet, and Exit Glacier is one of just a handful of glaciers accessible by one of its roads.

My project is turning 5 former termini of Exit Glacier (that have melted away) into an interactive AR mobile app that visitors to the park and park rangers can use as scientific/educational tools. The former glacier will be visible again as if global warming hadn’t stolen it from us!

We are working with some amazing people and are going to make an immersive 360 degree video game version of the piece available to all smart devices!

• Go to the Kickstarter page and donate!
• Check out our home base for it
• And like our group the Institute for Speculative Media which is one of the Art House Residents at Out North Contemporary Art House!

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SEATTLE, 12 June – Author Neal Stephenson and his 2-year-old Subutai Corporation want to throw away plastic triggers and bring “real” swordsmanship to video gaming. Along the way he seems interested in exploring the future of writing: novels, fiction, etc, in an age of instantaneous networking. The “Clang” project will produce semi-proprietary “user sharable” resources, allowing free development within Clang, and licensable options for external applications:

The video mentions “developing tools for others to use”. Does this mean Open Source, or do you intend to license this technology?

Our tools will be free to use for user created content (UGC) for CLANG, much like any other modding/UGC tools. If another company wants to use them for their own games, we will develop a license. We have not yet throught through all of the implications of making all of our stuff fully open source and so we can’t commit to that one way or the other yet.

Unfortunately you can’t embed Kickstarter videos on WordPress.com (I’ve already sent them both to their rooms with no dinner, but so far they still refuse to play nice) but you must go to Kickstarter and watch the “main” video (the one below is the “supplemental” video) Neal Stephenson is brilliant in this video. You may or may not love the project, but this is without a doubt the greatest Kickstarter pitch video I have ever seen.

• Clang project on Kickstarter

• Subutai Corporation

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MINNEAPOLIS, 15 April – Local artist and Associate Professor of Art at Saint Cloud State University, Rosemary Williams is fundraising at Kickstarter.com for her multimedia / video project Two-Faced Beauty, wherein she reperforms the life of her namesake / doppelganger from a half-century ago, Rosemary Williams.

Broadway showgirl Rosemary Williams was an up-and-coming model and star of the stage in the early ‘50s. She graced the covers of everything from pinup magazines to Life between 1949 and 1951. In the final year of her fame, Williams… was pulled into the scandalous court trial of her ex-boyfriend Sid Levy…

The script is built entirely from “found words” obtained in court files, magazine articles, gossip columns, transcripts of police interrogations, and wire-tapped phone calls from the apartment she shared with three showgirls. They reveal a world of auditions, prostitution, intimate relationships, photo-shoots, eviction notices, hangovers and black eyes.

I’ve just made a pledge to Williams’ Kickstarter.com campaign and encourage readers to consider joining in. Williams has created a compelling body of work which you’ll find on her website and also on her Rosemary Goes to the Mall podcast site chronicling her art adventure making a purchase at every single shop (sans two) at The Mall of America.

• Two-Faced Beauty @ Kickstarter.com

• Rosemary Williams’ Website

• Rosemary Goes to The Mall

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YOUR WALLET, 13 March – Last month Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler famously, or now infamously, told Carl Franzen of Talking Points Memo that “it is probable that Kickstarter will distribute more money this year than the NEA.” (National Endowments for the Arts) Kickstarter will distribute over $150 Million to user’s projects. NEA’s FY 2012 budget is $146 Million. There’s been lots of good discussion of what this does and doesn’t mean and how Kickstarter and the NEA are apples and oranges.

None-the-less, I Personally love, love, love Kickstarter!

But…

I love this new media platform, but… I wonder if it doesn’t, paradoxically, privilege old media… the world of objects… commodity culture…

Is it in Kickstarter’s DNA, in Kickstarter’s waffle-iron that we pour our project batter into, that it favors old media objects? Even if they’re shiny new toys, it’s still oldschool object culture.

I wrote from CAA about shifting from art about Scarce Objects, to art about Participatory Experiences:
• http://vaneeesa.com/2012/02/29/where-is-public-space/
• http://vaneeesa.com/2012/03/03/nancy-popp/

This shift, while it feel like a true shift, rippling far beyond my own personal purview, is of course, a choice, a perspective, the art festivals and art auctions are still overflowing with commodity culture at its finest and probably always will be.

While you can fund a really wide range of projects on Kickstarter, and while the rewards I’ve seen on Kickstarter have been wildly different, and while I do believe “backers” go there mostly for love and support and to build a better, deeper, richer, more vibrant culture… there’s no denying the trinketfulness of the “rewards” structure. Kickstarter doesn’t have to be, but feels so much like it wants to be, manufacturing, like giving you special object X for special donation Y.

Great.

I can’t deny that I like objects. It’s true that shiny baubles are fun. Yet for me, art in the 21st century wants to be an ephemeral, enveloping, participatory current that buoys us up and weaves community, that needs money, yet can’t be bought with money, that at it’s best, is about participatory experiences, not about scarce objects. Public Art. Free Culture. Virtual Space. New Media Experiences. But when you look at Kickstarter rewards structures, and at how many peeps pledge at what level, it’s clear that in addition to all that “good stuff” peeps are indeed pledging at specific object levels.

So that’s the Kickstarter conundrum in a nutshell, that we leverage the exciting new media global brain… in pursuit of creating more oldschool objects. I’ve commented in the past that all the cybersex in a world like Second Life is ironic in that it’s employing post-human technology to satisfy proto-human impulses. Perhaps Kickstarter too is revealing and bumpily riding the inconsistencies in who we were and whoever it is that we are in the process of becoming.

I made a small Kickstarter contribution to a hugely cool project yesterday: The Annual Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival. I love this project because it showcases women artists. I love this project because it takes the voice of this enormously important artform back from the misogynist tones we sometimes hear there. I love this project because it doesn’t produce objects, it produces experiences. But to be honest, I especially love this project because the rewards structure doesn’t offer physical objects, it offers ephemeral experiences… a video stream… a skype chat.

It may be in Kickstarter’s nature to favor object production, but projects like The Annual Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival show that the batter we pour into this new media waffle-iron can itself be new media culture. Bravo Ladies!

• http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladiesofhiphop/the-annual-ladies-of-hip-hop-festival
• http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/vaneeesa

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