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Abstract
Today, augmented reality (AR) apps for museums, archives, and cultural heritage sites are popular among visitors and institutions alike. While AR apps make a significant impact on our engagement with cultural memory and narratives, these projects are usually discussed either in isolation or as a part of a larger consideration of the contemporary culture of digital heritage. This paper expands the individual analysis of AR projects in the context of cultural heritage sites by conceptually adjusting the Expanded Field to map the varying modes of this cultural practice. This comparative approach helps to develop an understanding of AR as a creative tool while illuminating the politics of this form of cultural production. I demonstrate how these in situ, synchronized mobile interactions illustrate specific social and cultural conditions, and spatial dynamics, through the mixing of virtual and actual pasts and futures. I further discuss how this diagram can be used as a practical tool in the development of future projects, and how it is useful in mapping and thinking through some of the essential issues that underlie many AR projects, such as digital memory, the centralization of narratives, and the linearity of history.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2021.6.63730
Author
Liron Efrat
is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the department of Art History at the University of Toronto, where she researches Augmented Reality art. Her master’s thesis explores hybrids of art and pornography in contemporary photography, and her current research focuses on artistic hybrids that employ Augmented Reality technology, to better understand the role this technology plays in diminishing the division between the virtual and the real. Liron is also a resident scholar at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and a data analyst and research assistant in the VR and AR project “Jewish Homelands.”