XR: Crossing and Interfering Artistic Media Spaces

Abstract

In this chapter, we investigate some of the different ways that mobile media art projects as simultaneously experimental and performative practices are sites of inquiry into the specificities, possibilities, limitations, and tensions that we encounter within today’s highly mediatized and mediated environments. These art projects produce mobile media spaces that are creative laboratories for experimentation and analysis of ubiquitous, locative, and mobile technologies and their implications for our presence and relating in this contemporary, cultural moment. Specifically, we explore the continuum between the connecting and increasingly overlapping fields of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) as part of the more open and flexible category of Extended Reality—or as we conceptualize it here, Crossing Reality (XR). As an inclusive bracket, the concept of XR allows us to look beyond more rigid and historically determined, technology-based delineations that make up some subgenres of mobile media art, while seeking to explore a shared agenda of these different forms of media art. Zooming in on a few XR projects that make use of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, we explore in this chapter how, albeit in different ways and on different levels, these works all experiment with, and question the impact of technology. This impact on our spaces and situations, and our doings and mobilities within these spaces and situations, implies a working of technology at not only the phenomenological level, but also ontological, epistemological, and political registers that run through our private and public spaces. As such, the artistic scrutiny of technology, central to this chapter, involves technologies that are usually defined as mobile technologies (e.g. various GPS and other sensing technologies) but also interactive visualization technologies that activate other meanings of “mobility.” As technologies of mobility, these demonstrate an activation of both bodily and participatory engagement, a mobilizing of affect, thought and opinion, and a productive crossing of multiple (generic and disciplinary) boundaries in co-creative processes.