Where AR We: The Embodied Experience in Augmented Reality (AR) Art

“All reality is mixed reality”, Mark Hansen declares in Bodies in Code (2006). Proclaiming that reality is formed via the mixing of bodies with technologies, Hansen explains that perceptual paradigms are configured by technologies’ applications. Adopting Hansen’s approach, I examine the embodied experience and our perception of reality in digital art installations that employ one of the most influential technological advancement in the past two decades: Augmented Reality (AR).

While AR is becoming a ubiquitous technology, it is crucial that we ask ourselves: How do we perceive our new, augmented reality and how does it influence our sense of embodiment?

Since digital artists have been at the forefront of facing these issues, this paper analyzes the embodied experience in key AR artworks. By means of comparing AR artworks to the (dis)embodied experiences in selected VR art installations, I demonstrate how AR art suggests a reconfiguration of the cultural polarity of reality, virtuality, and augmentation. Focusing on works by members of the artistic collective Manifest.AR, I argue that AR art illuminates a convergent reality, which is based on a converged sense of spatial mapping and proprioception. Exploring this in-situ and orchestrated form of mobile interactions, I demonstrate how AR art exposes specific social and cultural conditions and spatial politics through the mixing of material and immaterial aspects of bodies, technologies, and spaces. Ultimately, I suggest that AR art openly discusses our transformed perception of what Virtual Reality means today, and accordingly, it reflects a new mode of social reality.