AR Installation Explanation by Elena Zanichelli

inVisible Presence, Garden of Villa dei Pini, The Bogliasco Foundation, Via Aurelia 4, Bogliasco, ITALY.

Organized within the Settimana della Cultura program from 14th until 22nd April 2012

Curated by the Ministero per i beni e le Attivitá Culturali.

"Augmented Reality Busts in the garden of Villa dei Pini"

On the occasion of the celebration of the 15th year of activity of the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Bogliasco Foundation will open the Villa dei Pini's eighteenth century garden to the public. Located close to the Via Aurelia, which follows the track of the ancient Roman road to the town of Ventimiglia and France, the Genoese style garden features paths with breathtaking views of the Mediterranean from a cliff which goes down to a steep rocky seaside. Since its inaugural year, the Linguria Study Center's garden has hosted strange and stimulating encounters, being a location for both meditation and creativity.

inVisible Presence - Augmented Reality Busts, the installation by Steve Bull, explores the unusual intersection between sculpture in public places and the most modern digital technologies. It will guide the public down the garden path to stop in search of inVisible Presence. These presences will be seen only on the screens of the visitors' smart phones or iPads, showing the busts of academics, artists, writers, novelists, choreographers and professors, composers and architects from all over the world. These busts will talk to the visitors about their projects at the Study Center. While literally geo-localized, these traces or presences are superimposed on the reality of the garden, memorializing research work or artistic endeavour that occurred at the Villa dei Pini.

The protagonists of this “encounter hunting” are the visitors themselves, who are invited to explore the garden and interact with it.

The technology used in inVisible Presence overturns the celebratory and "irremovable” aspect of the traditional bust, not only by making the traces of the presences fluid, but also by adding new information that should stimulate (im)probable discussions and encounters.

To this extent, Steve Bull participates in the contemporary debate about virtual experiments with augmented reality, a technology which enriches our perceptions by electronically addressing information which is not available otherwise to our five senses. He does this by taking an ancient expression of individuality, the bust, and putting it in a traditional location, a garden. By allowing the busts to talk and to be both visible and invisible, he invites the visitors to consider the social impact of virtual reality and the its creative potentialities, both popular and emotional.

The scope of inVisible Presence is to create a network of conversational interferences which can transmit us beyond our culture, the living and lived, the speaking and spoken. It creates a lively experimental laboratory in a micro-political environment of confrontation, discussion and cultural cooperation.

by Elena Zanichelli
Bogliasco Fellow 2012

Translation IT=>EN: Alessandra Natale and Terese Svoboda
AR browser: Junaio

Progress in front of Villa dei Pini

Here is a work-in-progress screen grab from my iPad2. First, I acquire latitude and longitude coordinates from Google maps to postion Pasquale Pesce and Marina Harrison in front of the main entrance to the Villa dei Pini. Afterwards I walk around the site viewing the results. In technical rehearsals next week I plan to make corrections to the busts' orientation that will alter the keystone visual effect the next time a visitor views from this postion.

inVisible Presence

I am installing thirty-eight virtual AR busts in the garden of the Villa dei Pini by a commission celebrating the 15th year of the Bogliasco Foundation. The current fellows that you see as busts in this photo (L to R) are Arni Ingolfsson, Ersi Sotiropoulos and Judith Wechsler. My next several posts are dedicated to my installation process.