Visualizing Cities: Augmented Reality as a Critical and Creative Medium for Digital Cultural Heritage

How do new technologies of representation and communication impact our ability to tell stories and create cultural heritage experiences in the city? What are the unique affordances of augmented reality for historic place-making and interpretation? The case of augmented reality erupts alongside the burgeoning growth of pervasive computing and artificial-intelligence driven systems of data ingress and outflows. How do the economic, social, and technological challenges of authoring with new media tools contribute to who gets to “speak” in the virtual realm? What are the aesthetic, ethical, and cultural implications of using the 2D and 3D geospatial telecommunications and surveillance grid as a substrate for artistic and critical expression? Are such projects inevitably co-opted or tainted by the systems they engage, or is there room for productive maneuvers? How do temporal, situational, and technological constraints contribute to the defining features of the medium? This paper will explore these questions by examining 21st century history of urban AR interventions. It will look back to precursor urban exploration systems that relied on wifi and mobile phones alongside paper-based supplements, reflect on the rise and fall of WYSIWYG AR authoring systems in the early 10s, engage with experiments in AR activism and location-based storytelling, investigate the consolidation of accessible authoring tools into commercially-based systems, and consider the potential of the newly diversified AR landscape today, with its links to social media, digital archives, immersive virtual reality, and games, as well as the imminent promise of ever-faster networks and increasingly ubiquitous grids of information.