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Augmented Reality in Art: Aesthetics and Material for Expression
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, July, 2008
York University Department of Communication & Culture, Toronto
Stephen Heath begins his introduction to the collection of essays, The Cinematic Apparatus,
with an observation about the early descriptions and advertisements of cinema. He writes, “In
the fi rst moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the immediate
interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine, the apparatus. The Grand
Café programme is headed with the announcement of ‘Le Cinématographe’ and continues
with its description: ‘this apparatus, invented by MM. Auguste and Loius Lumiére, permits the
recording, by series of photographs, of all the movements which have succeeded one another
over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these
movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience’;
only after that description is there mention of the titles of the fi les to be shown, the ‘sujets
actuels’, relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet.” The context here is that, after
sixty years of critical analysis of fi lm on the basis of narrative text, expressive composition,
psychology, and a range of other methods, Apparatus Theory desired to re-approach cinema
through an a priori look at the structure of technology (in the larger sense) involved. New Media
Art is continually in the situation of early cinema; so much of our descriptions of its functions
with each new technological iteration are based on the apparatus present: markers, circuits, tags,
live cameras, streaming data, processing, screen technologies—descriptions of these things often
come fi rst in order to identify the territory of a piece of media art. This is a banal observation,
but, similar to Stephen Heath’s citation of this as a starting point for an apparatus theory of
cinema—standing in for both a criticism of our focus on technology and our glossing over of
its ideological complexities—I start with this as a point of both jumping over and jumping
in to a way of understanding media art through its technology. Marshall McLuhan writes an
appropriate graphic aphorism of theory in Understanding Media: “Just before an airplane breaks
the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility
of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and
opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never
so vividly fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies, the moment that translated us
beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The movie, by sheer
speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the
world of creative confi guration and structure.” What I want to begin to look at is a similar
jumping forward to look back... if cinema was the epitome of sequence and connections in a
world where time had become connection, then where are we now, and what can we now see
behind us?
Though the mode of thought I’ll put forward here can be applied to analysis of new media art
broadly, I’d like to focus here on areas of new media art most closely related to cinema through
apparatus—media