Making (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home & Universe One
This essay is a digitized draft of Curator Talk by Phoo Myat Thwe on 9th April 2022, at Myanm/art Gallery, Yangon, Myanmar.
AR Artworks of (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home in Public Spaces. Instagram (@re_imagine_city)
It all started with a fake non-existing foot, the size of a two-story building, in the middle of the street. Apple offered Augmented Reality art sessions in 2019, partnering up with leading contemporary artists, curated in partnership with New Museum in New York. Named “Today at Apple”, three sessions offered different experiences to the participants. In [AR]T Walk, invited artists reimagined their art practices in urban spaces; e.g, Nick Cave’s iconic Soundsuits standing over a high rise building in NYC. The project also included [AR]T Lab and [AR]T in the Apple Store, the former offering a free 90 minutes session to the public on how to create Augmented Reality works, and the latter letting the public experience “Amass”, an AR piece by Nick Cave in Apple stores.
Artworks from Today at Apple Project
“Augmented reality is a medium ripe for dynamic and visual storytelling that can extend an artist’s practice beyond the studio or the gallery and into the urban fabric.”
Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director for the New Museum.
What is (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home about? First, let’s talk about the (Re)Imagine part. Reimagining is looking at the existing established structures and rethinking what are the other possibilities, alternative ways of being. Imagining is free of boundaries. Anything is possible in our imaginations. (Re)imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home is (re)imagining without boundaries and not caring about the established structures that limit us. This is reflected in our (Re)Imagine City logo designed by artist ZUNE (Thoughtform) with two very distinctive colors of green and purple. Green represents greenscreens, a tool of manipulating, layering reality and purple represents imagination. With this logo, the only thing we want to communicate is this; in (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home projects, we are (re)imagining reality as we like.
The concept for (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home came to me in late 2019, influenced by the influx of AR art exhibitions in public spaces and immersive design studios in western countries. I saw potential for AR in art in Myanmar as well. It’s no secret that Public Art in Myanmar is scarce. Public Art is scarce in Myanmar not because the artists don’t create, but because they don’t have opportunities to put their artworks in certain public places where Art can’t infiltrate unless commissioned. Murals are painted over, short-term art installations in public spaces are dismantled with time, expressions are oppressed, there is little space for art to breathe in public spaces in Myanmar. The core concept of the (Re)imagine City/(Re)imagine Home Project is to create an opportunity for artists to imagine how they can reshape their cities’ environments, to imagine putting their works in spaces they couldn’t invade with physical materials and help them create their unrealized projects virtually while getting involved in the process of adding social cultural values to cities. Therefore, in the process of production, location choices of the artworks mattered and how we let people interact with these works mattered as well. In the beginning, (Re)Imagine City project was conceptualized as a walking tour with artworks belonging to an assigned street, or area where numerous signposts will be erected in designated places people can visit on foot to view the works via their mobile phones. Numerous applications of fundings failed in 2019 and early 2020, where Covid has not arrived in Myanmar yet. With the arrival of pandemic and lockdowns, the physical gathering of a walking tour had a bleak future to actualize, which was again made impossible after the 2021 coup, (imagine a group of people with phones held up as if documenting something walking around in the streets in coup-ridden Myanmar.) However, the project received funding in late 2021 from the RECONNECT Cultural Program by Goethe Institut Myanmar. The work can begin now with a few changes made to its original idea.
The process started with an Open Call. I think open calls are exciting because it is an invitation to collaborate. In this particular work, open calls were crucial. Augmented Reality is quite a bizarre concept to artists in Myanmar. The results can be foreign, unpredictable or worst, unsatisfactory. It’s important for the artists to have a spirit of experimentation and a sense of adventure, when working with a technology that’s unfamiliar to them. I needed enthusiastic artists who are willing to venture into an unknown realm.
Given the circumstances of the coup, the original idea of walking tours is no longer safe. The original idea was to make the artworks site specific using image/ target tracking AR, meaning the viewer needs to be in a specific location in front of a specific image to scan it and see the work. This could alienate most viewers who are outside of Myanmar. Therefore, an Instagram account under the name @re_imagine_city was created to host the artworks. No longer bound to a physical space, anyone with a phone around the world is able to view the (Re)Imagine City artworks.
Lotus Calling by Aung Nyein Chan, in front of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, June 2023.
(Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home is low-budget. There are many ways for artists to showcase their Augmented Reality works. You can create your own application which viewers can download and see your works. Or you can choose to host it through third party applications such as Artivive. For our project, the artworks are created using Spark AR by Meta and hosted through Instagram. There was no extra budget necessary for the technology involved or for hosting the works, except for AR Designer and artists’ fees. The available budget also allowed us to open up a Mixed Reality exhibition “Universe One”, where artists build a mock-up cityscape inside a gallery space. Audiences can move through the space and use their phones to scan the QR codes provided to see the AR works. Universe One was also not conceived in its original plan as well. Initially, the idea was to build a 3D virtual cityscape online, where the audience looked via screen and again saw the AR via screen. However, with experience, I understood that virtual exhibitions are technically challenging to maintain for the organizers and challenging to navigate for the viewers. As such, we built a physical exhibition outside, where people can gather and experience the works together.
"Digital space and digitization are not exclusive conditions that stand outside the non digital. Digital space is embedded in the larger societal, cultural, subjective, eco- nomic, imaginary structurations of lived experience and the systems within which we exist and operate."
Reading the city in a Global Digital Age , Saskia Sasen.
Presentation Slide from Curator Talk by Phoo Myat Thwe.
What is a public space? A public space is an open & accessible space of shared experiences. They are living non-breathing structures which house collective memories and histories of the people that move through them. Here we also have to talk about spatialization. The structures of cities speak directly to our society. Cities can be designed with power structures to govern its people in terms of architecture and accessibility. In its architecture, memories of oppressions can be recorded, (e.g colonial architecture of Yangon.) Using Augmented Reality, we can disrupt these contained histories and make alternative meanings, layering upon the established structures and claiming our own space. Cities in the digital age transform societal structures as well. The “Work From Home” culture enabled easily by technology normalized during Covid led us to question why we ever needed offices in high rise buildings of capitalistic structures. Cryptocurrency is questioning why banks are at all necessary. Physical reality where our bodies exist and virtual reality where our digitized selves exist are not two separate existences but they inform and correlate to each other. For me, this exhibition was a chance to experiment these relations. The possibilities AR provides enable me to think freer. The discovery that non-existing forms can shape existence is intriguing to explore further.
(Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home & Universe One is rooted in self-empowerment and rebellious spirit, reclaiming our own spaces from which we have been exiled. But there is also a bigger conversation surrounding this work. It is a chance to think about how our cities are built and our relations to them. Who has more space and who doesn’t? Which spaces are accessible to us, which are not and why? What can we do about it? (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home is an experimental exploration of art-making with Augmented Reality and introducing an alternative way of art infiltrating public spaces without permission or request to access, what we so need to do to express anything in Myanmar.
