Augmented dreams

Many forms of artistic expression might be considered as an augmentation of reality. What are the challenges for 'Augmented Reality - technologies that enhance physical reality by layering interactive computer-generated content to it - when used as an artistic medium? While the underlying technologies (tracking, displaying and rendering) that drive augmented reality focus on a transparent creation, distribution and access of information the artist should critically examine their implementation. V2_Lab considers the artistic Research and Development (aRt&D) as an important element that can introduce specific qualities in the field of technological innovation and realization. Especially in the interdisciplinary collaboration with engineers and computer scientists, the artistic approach is unconventional in connecting different research fields, leaving behind discipline-specific paradigms. A key question in the creation of an art project is: what should the work communicate and what should the audience experience? Cinema could be an interesting case study, it has stimulated our imagination for more than a century and numerous successive media strive towards achieving a resembling experience in their audience: a cinematic impact. Nowadays cinema is everywhere, especially outside the confines of the movie theatre: it exists in all manner of altered forms and has become moreover an essential aspect of contemporary art. The interest that artists have in cinema is nothing new: it can be trace back to the early twentieth-century avant-gardes who explored the possibilities of film and initiated the continuing interaction between art and cinema. What is this particular experience we describe as 'cinematic' that attracts us to the movie theatre? In his book from 1916, The Photoplay A Psychological Study, Hugo Münsterberg states: "Everybody knows from his own experience that there is a sharp and specific analogy between the film forms and the mental mechanism by which consciousness functions on all its levels." In order to emerge, the cinema illusion asks for imagination. Film functions as a trigger for the mental processes that generate the true inner illusion. Film fused the magical way of creating movement introduced by the optical illusion toys with the qualities of photography to capture and represent reality. This merger shifted the attention of watching movement depicted to an expressive way of creating illusions by framing the world, structuring time and linking one experience to the next with sensations of images and sounds in space and time. Only later did the world in front of the camera became a constructed one, based on adopted elements of narration, stage play and music from theatre, opera and Vaudeville. A fabricated mise en scene to appeal the human imagination chimerically: unreal, imaginary and visionary. The present accelerated progress of information technologies are inevitably defining new directions of how moving images will be experienced in the future, going beyond the viewing constellation of today and changing the relation between the creator, his tools and the viewer. Digital media do not represent, they generate. They are software rather than hardware and unlike any other medium we have ever known, ephemeral: transforming and growing systems in itself. The virtual tool becomes a (re-)active actor in the creation of dynamic processes and demands for different approaches to those from the era of mimicking media.