Re+Public - Augmented Reality Video Release

Keith Harring Augment, Bowery Wall NYC, 2012

As many PublicAdCampaign readers know, we have spent the past 10 years on an artistic/activist adventure, investigating the relationship between commercial media and our shared public visual environment. Projects have ranged from individual campaigns to massive civil disobedience projects, speaking engagements and teaching, to legal battles and gallery exhibitions. While our intentions have always been to promote the greater good, our tactics have often been required to reside in a more dubious arena, falling somewhere short of fully legal and always outside of mainstream practice.

How & Nosm Augment, Wynwood Walls Miami, 2012

Two years ago I began working with another like mind at The Heavy Projects on an augmented reality mobile application. We saw AR as a way to leap the private property boundaries that made my artistic activism illegal and put curatorial responsibility in the hands of the public. In the future, no longer will billboards and other outdoor media demand your attentions as you walk through public space. Instead we will curate our public visual experience in new and exciting ways.

MOMO Original Augment, Wynwood Walls Miami, 2012

Today we released some video footage of two projects we recently completed which you can view by clicking the above photos. The first is a "resurrection" project done at the infamous Bowery Wall in NYC and the second is a more advanced interactive mural project done at Wynwood Walls Miami this past December. While I am excited to release these videos to the world, I am looking forward to more progressive uses of the technology in 2013, the eventual goal being to deploy a full scale digital mural program here in NYC.

website: www.republiclab.com
facebook: www.facebook.com/republiclab

New Project Hopes to Turn Building Facades Into Virtual Murals You Can See on Your iPhone

As you may or may not know me and my friend at The Heavy Projects have been working on getting an Augmented Reality mural project off the ground. There are some exciting developments I cant wait to let everyone know about but until then here is a nice article from The LA Weekly. Enjoy!

VIA: The LA Weekly

Los Angeles isn't known as a city with great public spaces. It's a city that traditionally has been beholden to private interests, back-room development deals and, of course, the car. Not coincidentally, it's also a city that has been hostile to street art, until it recently began conflating murals with commercial messages and battling multiple billboard lawsuits. As the city slowly begins to course-correct its past mistakes, a new art initiative addresses the intersection of private space and public art -- entirely virtually.More [HERE]

Virtual Murals for Real-Life Buildings

Big thanks to Emily Badger for writing this nicely informed explanation of what we are trying to do with the Re*public Mobil App. 

VIA The Atlantic Cities

If you want to paint a public mural, you will need at least several of these things: money, connections to someone who has money, a building, or permission to use someone else’s. Oh, and lots and lots of paint. For all of these reasons, public art is a lot harder to come by in most cities than its commercial counterpart: billboards, fliers, and advertisements. More [Here]

Re*public Mobile App is a Reality

Today HeavyPAC launched our demo version of the Re*public mobile application with the help of MOMO who offered us designs from which we rendered some 3D forms. The application takes advantage of Augmented Reality and its ability to "recognize" objects in our environment. Once recognized the application presents digital content over the recognized object allowing us to create murals with all of the standard digital bells and whistles, sound, 3D, movement, interactivity, web access, etc. With this soft launch it is our hope to get some institutional support so that we can bring a large scale mural project to NYC with the appropriate production values and artistic works. As we develop things further we will keep you posted of our progress and any new AR capabilities that we put into play.

What is truly exciting for me about this new tech is its reproducability. Like the digital music copy, giving an AR location to someone else to use does not prevent your own continued use of the site. By developing AR trigger sites around NY, Re*public is building an infrastructure of AR sites which can be repurposed by many institutions and individuals. This allows for an incredibly open and democratic form of access to public space curation and one which leaps over the current issues of private property and monetary monopolization. In the future I hope that advertisings monopoly will be broken by the public's ability to curate its own visual public space.

Re*Public Website + Demo Video

Demo Video on Vimeo

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Re*public Press Release

Augmented Reality and the Reappropriation of Public Space

The AR AD Takeover project came out of a discussion between myself and BC Bierman. A paper has finalized that discussion and created an academic framework around which the project can be understood. Please take a look at it if the abstract below is of interest.

Abstract:

This project employs augmented reality (AR) technology to layer urban centers with artistic content in the virtual world. Specifically, the Takeover is an AR deployment that uses street level phone booth ads and billboards to trigger a citywide curated art installation that displays on Android and Iphone mobile devices. This project showcases street artists whose work has historically addressed commercial advertising in public space. This project examines how civic authorities allow certain private parties to profit while preventing or discouraging other forms of public media production. It is with a certain sense of ironic playfulness that we utilize technology to create a kind of hypAR-reality, which implodes the distinction between the physical and the digital, to make evident the consumptive hyper-reality created by commercial advertising. We hope to problematize the top-down hierarchy of the traditional advertising model and pave the way for a more democratic, relativistic model that opens up a meaningful discourse between commercial advertisers and the public. This project is premised on the idea that capitalism - simply by pursuing its natural operational processes - possesses inherent problems of defining the ideal citizen and creating incentives for the exchange of valuable ideas. Conceived in response to this flaw in the system, we designed the AR | AD Takeover as preliminary step in the evolution of the messaging in public space from being predominantly commercial to a more democratic, open environment.

Full Paper [HERE]

International Conference of Critical Geography 6

I am honored to be talking on behalf of PublicAdCampaign and the Heavy Projects at the 6th International Conference of Critical Geography today, August 17th. I will be presenting a paper written by BC Biermann that I helped conceive, and which focuses on the use of Augmented Reality in the reappropriation of public space. While the discussion will focus on AR's ability to democratize media production in our shared environment, it will also touch on the history of PublicAdCampaign and the 10 years of physical alterations we have done.

Literally sitting outside on a wooden bench typing this, I am excited to explore Frankfurt and see if I can find a store that sells black and white paper. While there are few ads here, there are enough for me to get involved and physically reclaim some outdoor commercial media after discussing how to virtually do the same.

Read AR I AD Takeover: Augmented Reality and the Reappropriation of Public Space [Here]

AR I AD Takeover NYC - Official Release

A little over a week ago PublicAdCampaign and The Heavy Projects tested an augmented reality advertising takeover project in Times Square. By using the actual advertisements as triggers, we were able to virtually reclaim complete ad campaigns and digitally hijack advertisements all over the city. What is most exciting to me is that because the augmentation happens using an actual physical trigger, the overlaid image is able to track in real time and retain perspectival relationships. This makes the overlay seem like it is truly there as it moves to accommodate your viewing angle. While semi-akward to view through a smart device held in ones hand, imagery overlaid using sunglasses with display capabilities would seamlessly integrate your digital and real life, allowing for the tactical omission of unwanted messages. (I know this all sounds a bit crazy but buckle up cause its coming whether you like it or not) The potential for this test program is profound and I dare say a step in the right direction to removing all outdoor advertising from public space and democratizing public dialogue once and for all. While the hurdles are still great, the future looks interesting and we are excited to be on the cutting edge of new possibilities. You can download the full press release [Here] or read it below.

While other media outlets such as television and the Internet have founds ways to provide users with the ability to filter their informational intake, public space remains the elusive frontier in which commercial interests govern the discourse.
In an effort to highlight the individual's lack of autonomy in this arena, Public Ad Campaign (NYC) in collaboration with The Heavy Projects (LA) have begun to explore the potential of augmented reality to reappropriate outdoor commercial signage in order transform, filter, and democratize the messaging in public space. Using the Junaio AR platform, the AR | AD Takeover channel has reappropriated five outdoor advertising campaigns by turning them into augmented reality markers. Specifically, the channel uses five ads in New York City's Times Square as triggers for a curated street art show that includes works by Ron English, OX, PosterBoy, John Fekner, and Dr. D.

As an alternate vision, we imagine a city landscape where instead of commercial billboards, a digitally open environment where individuals can determine their own visual dialogue through the participation in and subscription to augmented reality able to reflect our nuanced private interests. No longer is there a consumptive monologue, but rather options in a filterable and user-defined space where private interests are no longer subordinate to commercial ends.

For related and inspirational projects check out the Artvertiser and Add-Art

Well That Went Viral Before I had A Chance To….

Photo by Will Sherman of CityPhile

As you may or may not know, PublicAdCampaign and The Heavy Projects tested a new platform this weekend that uses Augmented Reality to virtually replace outdoor advertising with the artworks of some of my favorite physical outdoor advertising takeover artists, including Ron English, PosterBoy, John Fekner, OX, and Dr. D. A few bloggers were on hand to capture the magic and before we could compile an extensive video walkthrough of the project in action, things went viral, even being picked up by AdWeek. I will be posting a much more intense video in the next week or so showing the technology at work and in particular its ability to track the object in real time and correct for perspectival shifts which make the "takeover" feel almost real.

While this was a beta test of what is to be a much larger ongoing project that aims to eradicate outdoor advertising from your public space interaction, the program is live and running for anyone to view. You can do so by going to your app store or market on your iOS or Android device and searching Junaio. Download this program and search AR AD TAKEOVER. once the program loads you can hold your device up to any of the following advertisements to view their virtual replacement. That said, do it quick as the ads we have chosen will come down in the next week or so. One of our hurdles will be figuring out how to feed this project current ads as the content changes so you never have to look at an ad in public space again!

AR AD TAKEOVER Triggers:

Horrible Bosses - Horizontal phonebooth advertisement
30 Minutes or Less - Horizontal phonebooth advertisementCrazy Stupid Love - Horizontal phonebooth advertisementCrazy Stupid Love - Horizontal subway entrance advertisementHarry Potter - Horizontal phonebooth advertisementAliens and Cowboys - Billboard at 42nd street and 7th avenue SWC

Augmented Reality Advertising Takeover in Times Square from Will Sherman on Vimeo.