The Augmented Landscape

Boston Cyberarts commissioned four internationally acclaimed artists; John Craig Freeman, Kristin Lucas, Will Pappenheimer and Tamiko Thiel, to create 8 Augmented Reality (AR) sculptures for The Augmented Landscape, an outdoor exhibition that took place at the National Park Service’s Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Located on the historic waterfront in Salem, MA, the free exhibition opened to the public on Saturday, May 27, and remained on view through November 30, 2017. In addition at the Saugus Iron Works, Will Pappenheimer and Zachary Brady’s SkywriteAR generates virtual skywriting vapor phrases hundreds of feet above the viewer.

Inspired by Salem’s unique history and ecology, the eight artworks delved into issues as diverse as East-West relations, New England’s maritime connections with Russia, Japan & China, American idealism, the discord between globalism and isolationism, piracy as warfare, as well as the effects of climate change, global warming and rising waters.

Augmented Reality (AR) is computer-generated sound, video or graphics that are layered into a real-world environment. Sited throughout the park, either on the land and or in Salem harbor, the sculptures will be positioned via GPS, each in a specific place on the Salem campus, and will be viewable by using the augmented reality app Layar* (free for iOS and Android) on a smartphone or tablet.

The National Park Service also had printed maps available for visitors that include the site of each piece, an image, artists’ information, title of the work and how to download the app to view the work.

How to See the Art:

“Augmented Reality is the street art of the 21st Century!” adds artist Tamiko Thiel. “It is the medium par excellence for site-specific public art, giving artists unique opportunities to create works in the public sphere. It gives the phrase “artistic freedom” a whole new meaning!”

To make the most of your experience at The Augmented Landscape, we recommend downloading the free Layar app* before you come and bringing a freshly charged smartphone or tablet.

The Augmented Landscape is an exhibition of augmented reality art. To see the art in Salem at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, first enable location on your smartphone or tablet. Then download and launch the free Layar app for Apple or Android. Pull down the upper left hand Menu , tap Geo Layers, then Search Layers and search for the two words: Salem Art. The eight art works will appear. Open the map (.pdf) and follow it to the location of one of the red dots on the map and click the associated Layer. Look through your phone in all directions to find the work. To view another work, click the upper right hand Menu again and select another artwork.

The Artworks:

Gardens of the Anthropocene by Tamiko Thiel, 2016-2017

Mutant giant red algae invade Salem Harbor!

Standing at the water’s edge, the mutant giant red algae (Alexandrium collosus) ebb and flow around you, surrounding you with their spores. The giant algae are virtual, but the danger of them increasing to toxic levels more frequently with warming waters is real.

We are now in the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. My work series Gardens of the Anthropocene, originally commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum in 2016, looks at how climate change could affect local fauna. For this project I talked extensively with climate scientists at the University of Washington Center for Creative Conservation to understand basic climate change concepts and scenarios both locally in Seattle and for the world as a whole. I found that the algae of the genus Alexandrium was a primary culprit of red tides not only on the West Coast, but in many other parts of the world – including New England.

Based on this actual science but pushed into a dystopian science fiction scenario, my AR installation aims to give visitors an emotional encounter with normally invisible dangers of climate change by showing the microscopic Alexandrium Fundyense mutated into animated, giant red algae that ebb and flow far above current water levels.

Many effects of climate change, such as flooding due to rising water levels exacerbated by storm surges, or of shifts in flora and fauna as climate zones “migrate” northward, are not experienced by a majority of people because changes are incremental over larger time periods, or happen during catastrophic events where only local residents experience them directly. Here, augmented reality can give visitors an experience rooted at a specific site that expresses the dangers that could affect it in the future.

The Salem Maritime Museum addresses rising water levels exacerbated by storm surges directly on this page on its website. Additionally, rising water temperatures and other effects of climate change facilitate the harmful algal blooms (HAB), often called “red tides,” which can make shellfish that feed on the algae toxic for humans. In 2016 levels were low, but graphs tracking blooms over years show a large bloom can happen after a long quiescent period. Hopefully government funding to monitor these levels will remain intact – and the government will realize that closing its eyes to danger will not make it go away.

Treasures of Seh-Rem by Tamiko Thiel, 2017

What treasures did the Orient desire from Yankee traders? Treasures of Seh-Rem overlays the greensward next to Derby Wharf with a surreal fever dream of odd, precious wares, under the watchful eyes and hairy visages of Westerners, as depicted by Japanese artists under the shock of first contact.

The “China trade” brought America exotic oriental treasures: tea, spices and silks, porcelain and lacquerware. The city seal of Salem shows a ‘gentleman of Banda Aceh in Sumatra‘ in traditional dress, with a western ship under full sail in the background, to celebrate the first cargo of priceless pepper that came from Sumatra in 1797.

But what did China want from the West? Very little, as it turned out – which is why Britain started the Opium Wars to force China to accept opium in trade for goods. The most valuable cargos from Western traders were Spanish silver coins, ginseng from the Northeast USA (gathered by Native Americans, who did not value the root so highly), and then goods that the Salem traders acquired en route to Asia: opium from the Middle East and India, but also sea cucumbers and sandalwood from the Pacific Islands and fur seal pelts from the Pacific NW, South America and Antarctic.

My late father Philip Thiel was a naval architect in his first career, and had co-founded an ill-fated boatbuilding business in Essex with Dana Story, whose family’s shipyard is now the site of the Essex Shipbuilding Museum. So even while growing up on the West Coast, my father regaled me with sea chanties, stories of the Cape Ann area, and those who lived from the sea.

By the time I was 12-years-old I had also crossed the Pacific to Japan and back twice in a freighter (before container ships became ubiquitous – Dad had the patent but unfortunately did not implement it). Each time I returned to an America it was like the shock of first contact – finding America to be a strange and empty land compared with the density and ancient cultural history of Japan.

On a Japan Foundation fellowship in 2003 I researched how artists of both East and West visualized unknown cultures. In 2006, I embodied this viewpoint in a “reverse Marco Polo” virtual reality artwork series Travels of Mariko Horo. Mariko Horo, “Mariko the Wanderer,” is my fictitous time-traveling alter ego, a Japanese woman artist who creates the exotic and unknowable Occident based on just a few stories, images and maps, as did her real fellow artists in Japan during the 200 years when it closed itself off to the rest of the world.

Forbidden to all Westerners with the exception of Dutch traders, there were still two very rare visits from Salem ships. In Treasures of Seh Rem Mariko hears stories of these strange Yan Ki traders, and turns the spyglass around to visualize the Salem Maritime Museum greensward as a source of exotic commodities from the Land of Seh-Rem.

Virtual Russia and Virtual China by John Craig Freeman, 2017

John Craig Freeman has constructed two geo-located augmented reality public art experiences for the Augmented Landscape exhibition at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Virtual Russia and Virtual China. This two part project uses the historic Salem Custom House as a metaphoric portal, transporting users to alternative realities created by the artist on location in the cities of Wuhan in Central China and Saint Petersburg Russia last year. The project is meant to evoke the history and contemporary manifestations of globalization, international trade and revolution.

During its early history, the Port of Salem conducted trade with both the Baltic and China. This history is relevant today as the world struggles to reconcile the discord between globalization and the rise of nationalistic protection and isolationism. We tend to think of globalization as if it were something new.

In 2016 Freeman traveled to the city of Wuhan in Central China as part of the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator. The Arts Incubator is a State Department funded cultural diplomacy program, –or perhaps we should say, ‘was a State Department funded cultural diplomacy program’, as its future funding is in doubt.

The project used virtual and augmented reality technology to examine how change is being experienced by the local people. Considered one of the fastest changing cities in China, Wuhan just might be the fastest changing city in the world.

In the early 20th Century, colonial powers were making incursion into the markets of Central China and many set up concessions, or semi-autonomous trade zones, along the banks of the Yangtze River in old Hankou, one of present day Wuhan’s three sister cities. Foreign concessions included Britain, France, Japan, and importantly Russia. America never developed a concession, but it did run gunboats up the river and traded in tea and other commodities.

One of the many augmented reality experiences Freeman made in Wuhan was created on location in the Russian Concession, including the former villa of a famous Russian tea merchant named J. K. Panoef. Once the richest man in China, Panoef was a relative of Tzar Nicolai and the owner of Buchang Tea Company. He served as the Russian Consul General of Hankou at the time. Built in 1910, today the building is called ‘Panoef House’ or Bagongfangzi by locals.

During the final years of the Qing dynasty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, civil unrest, foreign invasions, and growing resentment of the presence of colonial power resulted in open rebellion. Although the Qing Imperial Court attempted reform, conservatives resisted, and many reformers were either imprisoned or executed. On October 10, 1911, one year after the completion of the Panoef House, armed revolution broke out in Wuchang, just across the river from Hankou and the Republic of China was founded, ending 4,000 years of Imperial rule. Foreigners, including Panoef, were driven out of the country and the Panoef House was subdivided and turned over as housing for common people.

Although today, the former palace is ramshackled and in a state of unhygienic disarray, many of the families living there can be traced back generations. As the historic core of Wuhan is bulldozed to make room for condominium towers, the Panoef House will no doubt be destroyed or redeveloped as luxury housing. Either way, the current residents will be moved, and the rich community fabric the building supports will be lost.
As users explore the Freeman’s augmented reality experience while walking the grounds of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, they encounter the residents of the Panoef House in the virtual building’s interior courtyard.

In November, 2016, Freeman was invited to exhibit work for the Prospect Festival in Saint Petersburg Russia, where he constructed an augmented reality experience based on the Panoef House and placed it in the Anna Akhmatova Museum Gardens.

Anna Akhmatova was a much beloved Modernist Russian poet and critic of totalitarian rule, whose work spanned the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as, the Stalin Regime. Because of her defiance and unwillingness to leave Petrograd, –now Saint Petersburg, Akhmatova spent much of her life under house arrest in her apartment overlooking the garden below. Today this garden acts as a memorial to her.

In 1917, just a few short years after the uprising in China, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the workers’ Soviets overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd dismantling the Tsarist autocracy. Uprisings and revolution are most often global in scope and effect, and never unrelated to globalization and colonial power aspirations.

While in Saint Petersburg, Freeman created virtual experiences of the city, including at Nevsky Prospect along the Griboyedov Canal from Kazan Square to the Cathedral of the Savior on Spilled Blood. By locating a virtual representation of Saint Petersburg and Wuhan at the historic waterfront in Salem, Freeman has created a conceptual portal between the three cities.

Research supports the probability that Salem traded in goods from the colonial concessions of Wuhan as well as from the city of Saint Petersburg, including tea. Emily A. Murphy, Park Historian for the Salem Maritime National Historic Site wrote, “The Baltic trade was huge here in Salem, although it hasn’t been studied much, probably because it isn’t as romantic and exotic as China. However, the first vessel that Elias Hasket Derby sent beyond the coast of the Americas after the Revolution was the Light Horse, which went to St. Petersburg in 1784 and opened trade with Russia for the new United States.”

As a public artists, Freeman is interested in the role that the public square plays in the shaping of political discourse and national identity formation. Whereas the public square was once the quintessential place to air grievances, display solidarity, express difference, celebrate similarity, remember, mourn, and reinforce shared values of right and wrong, it is no longer the only anchor for interactions in the public realm. That geography has been relocated to a novel terrain, one that encourages exploration of mobile location-based public art. Moreover, public space is now truly open, as artworks can be placed anywhere in the world, without prior permission from curators, governments or private authorities –with profound implications for art in the public sphere and the discourse that surrounds it.

In the early 1990s, we witnessed the migration of the public sphere from the physical realm, the public square and its print augmentation, to the virtual realm, the placelessness, the everywhere-but-nowhere of the Internet. In effect, the global digital network has facilitated the emergence a new space, –a virtual space, which corresponds to the physical geography around us. The public sphere is now crashing back down to place in the form of place-based virtual and augmented reality, without losing its distributed character or its connections to the vast resources of the worldwide digital network.

Much of what we understand the the purpose of public art to be, is that of monumentality and memorial. Freeman’s work reimagines memory and monuments in the context mobile networks and the internet as public space.

Both augmented reality experiences were created with photogrammetry, a technology used to extract three-dimensional models from sequences of photograph taken of people, places or things at multiple angles. The software detects parallax differences of key features in the images and generates a pointcloud dataset, –points in 3D space along an XYZ axis, with RGB color values assigned to each point. The pointcloud can be converted into a polygon model and placed anywhere on earth. Importantly, this technology allows for the creation of virtual experiences based on real places and real people in the world, bringing the ‘real’ to virtual reality.

Privateers Reenactment by Will Pappenheimer, 2017

This work, premiering for this exhibition, envisions the reenactment of Privateering, the Revolutionary War form of Congressionally-chartered private naval action. Salem Privateer vessels were estimated to have captured approximately 445 ships, generating funds for the revolution while acquiring private wealth beyond the needs for warfare. The giant virtual ball of galleon-style ship masts featured in this work was obtained from disassembled ship models accessed from shared 3D model websites. It hovers and rotates out over Derby Wharf, as a gigantic conglomeration sculpture. It evokes both memories of profit mixed with patriotism and current forms of voracious wealth acquisition and politics, which test the boundaries of social contracts understood to be the bedrock of American idealism.

Ascension of Cod by Will Pappenheimer, 2017

In its early days Salem Merchant trade specialized in the export of cod fish to bring home molasses, oranges, iron, salt and wines. Massachusetts Bay cod, the Atlantic Cod or Gadus morhua, were so plentiful that they became the hallmark of New England fisheries and trade. Up until recently. A 2014 NOAA scientific survey revealed that up to 80% of the cod have been either fished or suffered from the effects of warming oceans. A recent Discovery Channel film, Sacred Cod, documents the struggle between the cod fisherman’s livelihood and science behind the fisheries’ regulation. Ascension of Cod, premiering for this exhibition, suggests the shared hallowed role that the species plays in these two perspectives. This augmented reality work creates a school of virtual cod swimming upwards in a column around and above Scale House as if in an ascension to the heavens. It is in some sense both a reverence and farewell vision of the species that has fed us so well.

Goodbyes by Kristin Lucas.

Salem’s maritime ports have been the site of innumerable goodbyes between sailors, cadets, family, and lovers over the city’s nearly 400-year history.

3d models collected through online markets—crafted by others for “goodbye” occasions—arrive and depart from the landscape. Tributes to discontinued and retired aircraft, vestiges of 3d artists graduating onto more challenging software, a melting snowman, a figure stoically waving goodbye, and more. Each model has its own backstory.

Elephant In Room by Kristin Lucas. An elephant, brought to America as cargo, lounges in a psychiatrist chair reminiscing about its natural habitat—a twist on idioms: “elephant in the room” and “elephants never forget”.

The conspicuous “elephant in the room” is literalized to bring to the fore a history of unspeakable acts inherent to international trade and labor practices. The elephant is an elephant and a stand-in for humans and species divided and dislocated for the purpose of international trade. The walls of the metaphorical “room” are replaced with a porous virtual forest made up of freely-distributed 3d models collected through online trade markets.

The ship America of Salem is credited with carrying the first known elephant to America from Calcutta, landing first in New York, and exhibited in Salem in 1797 (Goodwin, 1951). According to John Frayler, historian of Salem Maritime NHS, the basement of the Custom House once became an incidental zoo serving as a temporary holding pen for exotic birds and animals imported to Salem by collectors and for resale (Pickled Fish & Salt Provisions, 1999).

And there is more to The Augmented Landscape. At the Saugus Iron Works, Will Pappenheimer and Zachary Brady’s SkywriteAR generates virtual skywriting vapor phrases hundreds of feet above the viewer. For the next six months, SkywriteAR texts relating to the notion of everything connected to “iron” will be posted in the sky at monthly intervals. And in the Salem Visitor Center, Pappenheimer creates another version of Ascension of Cod, fish swimming upward into the Center’s atrium.

About the Artists:

John Craig Freeman has more than twenty-five years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. Freeman seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place. He has produced work and exhibited around the world including in London, Mexico City, Calgary, Havana, Kaliningrad, Warsaw, Zurich, Belfast, Venice, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Milano, Sydney, Singapore, Liverpool, Coimbra, Basel, Paris, across America, as well as in Beijing, Xi’an, Wuhan, and Hong Kong. In 2016 he traveled to Wuhan, China as part of the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator. In 2015, he was the recipient of a commission from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology program. He has also had work commissioned by Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. The NEA awarded Freeman one of the last Individual Artist Fellowships in 1992. Freeman received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently a Professor of New Media Art at Emerson College in Boston.

Kristin Lucas explores the contingencies, issues and poetics of digital technologies through conceptual, performative, social and collaborative frameworks. She reinvents the familiar in uncanny circuitous works that lie somewhere between reality and “reality.” Lucas’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at galleries and museums, including Dia Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space (New York), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City), DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show (Houston), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (Liverpool), House of Electronic Arts (Basel), Nam June Paik Art Center (Gyeonggi-do), XPO Gallery (Paris), and ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe); and at festivals, including: Fusebox Festival (Austin), ISEA (Manchester/Liverpool); Transmediale Festival (Berlin), Visions of the Now Festival (Stockholm), and more. Lucas is represented by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Postmasters Gallery in New York, and And/Or Gallery in Los Angeles. She serves as faculty for the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and is a 2017 Artist in Residence at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center (New York) and Print Screen Festival and Yafo Creative (Tel Aviv).

Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn-based artist working in new media, performance, and installation with an interest in institutional or spatial intervention and the altered meaning of things. His work often explores the confluence and tension of the virtual and physical worlds. He is a founding member of the Manifest.AR collective. His projects and performances have been shown internationally at Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, Los Angeles; San Francisco MOMA; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul; Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zurich; Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles; the ICA, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; FILE, Sao Paulo, BR; Turbulance.org; Xi’an Academy of Art Gallery in China; and Exit Art, the New Museum and the 2017 Moving Image Art fair in New York. The artist’s works have been reviewed in Christiane Paulʼs recent historical edition of “Digital Art,” a chapter of Gregory Ulmerʼs theoretical book “Electronic Monuments,” Art in America, The New York Times, Hyperallergic.org, WIRED, Modern Painters, the Boston Globe, EL PAIS, Madrid, Liberation, Paris, and Art US. He teaches new and locative media at Pace University, New York.

Tamiko Thiel is an internationally acknowledged pioneer in creating poetic spaces of memory for exploring social and cultural issues in both virtual reality art (VR, since 1994) and augmented reality art (AR, since 2010). A founding member of the artist group Manifest.AR, she participated in their path-breaking guerrilla AR intervention at MoMA NY in 2010, and was main curator and organizer of their uninvited intervention into the Venice Biennial in 2011. Her works have also been shown at the Istanbul Biennale, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, ICA London, ICA Boston, and art fairs such as Art Gwangju, Contemporary Istanbul, UNPAINTED Munich and Moving Image New York. Her VR and AR works are featured in reference books such as Whitney curator Christiane Paul’s “Digital Art” and Stanford professor Matthew Smith’s “The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace.” Her work has been supported by the McDowell Colony, MIT Fellowship, IBM Innovation Award, WIRED Magazine, Japan Foundation Fellowship and Berlin Capital City Fund. As AR artistic advisor to the CCCADI, she helped secure a Rockefeller Cultural Innovation award for the “Mi Querido Barrio” AR project in East Harlem. In 2017 she is an Eyebeam New York Mentor and GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence.

Press:

Exploring an Augmented Reality: New media artist John Craig Freeman, Ronnie Gordon, Take Magazine, Nov. 18, 2017

Innovation Showcase: The Augmented Landscape, Jay Sugarman interviews George Fifield, NewTV

Augmenting the landscape in Salem, By Cate McQuaid, Galleries, Boston Globe July 27, 2017

What’s New – Augmented Reality, Chronicle, WCVB Channel 5, Produced by Andy Schulman, Jul 20, 2017

Big 3 Art: Augmented Landscape, by Maryam Yoon, Boston Hassle, July 3, 2017

The Augmented Landscape Exhibition at Salem Maritime National Historic Site, salem.org

Tag Archives: Augmented Reality: Spectral Visions on Derby Wharf, Donna Seger, streetsofsalem.com, May 31, 2017

Boston Globe May 28, 2017

Virtual Reality and Public Art Collide in “Augmented Landscapes”, By Claire Selvin, Boston Magazine, May 25, 2017

How Salem’s Augmented Reality Exhibit is Actually a Social Mission, by Natasha Mascarenhas, BostInno, April 5, 2017

Boston Cyberarts presents The Augmented Landscape, ARTFIXdaily, March 15, 2017

The Augmented Landscape

How to See the Art:

The Artworks:

About the Artists:

Sponsored By:

Press: