Battlegrounds and the 4th Wall: Nancy Baker Cahill's Site Specific, Inclusive, and Accessible Augmented Reality

Los Angeles based artist Nancy Baker Cahill works at the forefront of augment-reality art. She considers her practice to be intrinsically public art, often site-specific, collaborative, and accessible. The Los Angeles Times recently likened her work to a 21st-century version of Land Art. Battlegrounds (2019), Baker Cahill’s newest AR project, is unapologetically political, aimed to be inclusive to as many artists and issues that the term battleground conjures. Launching in the fall of 2019, Battlegrounds is site specific, identifying contested public sites in New Orleans, Louisiana, such as areas of land loss, Confederate statues (both existing and now empty former sites), to gentrified neighborhoods, levees, prisons, blighted neighborhoods, and indigenous territories. Created in collaboration with local artists whose work directly addresses themes related to the sites they choose to geo-locate their work, each artist’s work can be accessed on site via Baker Cahill’s free 4th Wall app, but are invisible to the naked eye. For Baker Cahill, this a new subversive public art which asks no permission, prompting thoughtful discourse around the most urgent issues the artworks and chosen sites represent for the communities they serve. In total, Battlegrounds will be a city-wide exhibition in augmented reality activated simultaneously and experienced through smartphones. This paper considers Battlegrounds, as part of the new arena of AR artwork, one that aims to be collaborative, inclusive, and accessible to a wide range of artists, users, and viewers helping open the door for greater possibilities of the medium, its presentation, and reception.