Augmented Reality in the Garden

Undergraduate / Graduate

Focusing on experimental strategies at a crucial moment in an emerging medium, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production for Augmented Reality (AR). By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical and sonic experiences, students will design, construct and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new tactics and interactive logics for layering technology onto real spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging AR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative works. Uniquely for this quarter we will be using a particularly stimulating and challenging space for our explorations - the Untidy Objects "sculpture" located south of Logan center. This carefully maintained, rewilded space will ultimately provide our canvas, our dataset and our classroom. Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete 4 short "sketches" towards a final AR experience.