On a recent trip to India to attend a friends’s wedding, I had a day lay over in Singapore. During my stay I visited the National Museum of Singapore to see an exhibition on Polaroid cameras that I was interested in, In an Instant: Polaroid at the Intersection of Art and Technology.

During the visit I stumbled across DigiMuse Connects, which was a part of Singapore Art Week 2019. DigiMuse is a program curated by the National Museum of Singapore for creative people, to design a projects that engages technology within the cultural sector.

One particular project caught my eye was, #FaceOfTheDaySG by fashion Designer Yang Derong. The designer used Instagram as a visual diary and documented his creation of a different outfit and persona for everyday of the year on the social media platform. The project focussed on creating a visual dialogue of these personas that reflected everyday events, social issues, icons and trends with the aim of starting a conversation with the online audience. The engagement was designed to make the audience think and reflect on contemporary issues through the images they were viewing.

For the exhibition, the artist used Augmented Reality (AR) to engage further with the audience by using an app called Artivive.

Artivive was created by Sergiu Ardelean and Codin Popescu in January 2017 in Vienna, Austria. The App uses AR to create an alternative experience for audiences in the way they consume artworks. According to the creators:

“Our vision is to change how art is created and consumed – and build the community around augmented reality art”.

Artivive Website

The App is used to transform the audience participation by creating an immersive experience when viewing artworks. As Yang Derong demonstrates in his exhibition,
the App was used to add additional layers to the artworks, creating a hybrid experience of art through real and virtual worlds.

The exhibition I visited consisted of one long corridor and one large room filled with the all the images documented on social media. Yang Derong had selected specific artworks for the AR experience. By using the App I was able to see the additional layer embedded into that specific image. The additional layers consisted of videos of Yang Derong in that specific persona.

It is this immersive experience that I would like to see audiences experience when seeing street art. Part of my creative project asks the question: how could technology be integrated into the street art experience?

Street art’s temporal dimension or ephemerality, could use this technology to highlight the multiple artworks that have been created in the same location over a period of time as well as show the layers of paint or stencils that create artworks, or capture the artist in action.

While I won’t be using this kind of technologies for my PhD creative project, the potential to extend my work through possibilities offered by AR and Virtual Reality (VR) for street art feels endless.