Image Credit: Simon Howden

Since 2013, the core of my digital media research has been around developing the notion of the ‘software assemblage’, firstly through augmented reality, and more recently in a wider media context. I have a book planned, where I will be extending my PhD research in art, design, and media, into a more extensive digital domain. I will be pointing my finger at an extended array of real world applications whose backbone is assembled by software as an agential force of culture.

For example, one of the public artworks I reference in the talk from Hong Kong posted below – Border Memorial by John Craig Freeman – can also be considered as virtual sculpture in the public domain, as well as a visionary and timely media artefact. Freeman’s is an intensely critical practice, that occupies an unflinching position in contemporary digital culture. Freeman was ahead of his time re-imagining the trauma of immigrants crossing the US/Mexico Border through virtual skeletons placed at points where people had succumbed to death during the perilous crossing. In 2018, in this Trump dominated era, the reality of that heartache is firmly in the news everyday.

Below is another presentation from the Vancouver ISEA2015, held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. 18 August 2015. The topic is “Mobile Augmented Reality Art and the Politics of Re-assembly”. Preparing this talk I received a wonderful amount of support and in depth information from Tamiko Thiel and Will Pappenheimer about their work Biomer Skelters, as well as from John Craig Freeman who supplied a bunch of fantastic images of his LACMA art and technology grant winning project, Things We Have Lost. Big thanks to them all!

And below here is the project presentation about ‘Ko Maungawhau ki runga’, a performative research project by the author on the site of a former 17th century Maori Pa (fortified village) in Auckland, New Zealand. It was a subset of the long-term project ‘Do we see in algorithms’ and used location aware technology to deploy augments at precise nodes in a meaningful location. Accessed on foot, the augments explored multiple strategies for engagement between Global Positioning Systems (GPS), the smartphone as an art interface, user, artist and site.

Following is a full list of my conference presentation since 2013. Published papers that resulted can be found on my Academia.edu and Researchgate profiles.

22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2016).
Presentation: “Augmented Reality as Experimental Art Practice: from Information Overlay to Software Assemblage”.

Post-Screen 2016: International Festival of Art, New Media and Cybercultures.
Presentation (via Skype): “Augmented Virtuality: Remixing the Human-Art-Machine”. Universitarias Lusofonas and Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

6th International Mobile Innovation and Creativity Symposium, 1 December 2016. Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia.
Presentation topic: “From AR to VR on Smartphones: Paradigms and Paradoxes of Mobility.”

21st International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2015).
Presentation: “Mobile Augmented Reality Art and the Politics of Re-assembly”. Vancouver, B.C. 18 August 2015.

Postscreen: Device, Medium, Concept (2014).
Presentation topic: “Augmented Virtuality: Remixing the Human-Art-Machine”. Hosted by the University of Lisbon Faculty of Arts / Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

19th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2013).
Presentation topic: “We see in algorithms.”

3rd Mobile Creativity and Mobile Innovation Symposium, 19-21 November 2013.
AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand.
Presentation topic: “Experimental media art and transmedia storytelling.”