Genesis of a Strategy for Invisible Art

Arthur Clay, Virtuale Switzerland

INTRODUCTION

This article is about a journey made while creating and exhibiting invisible arts and searching for strategies that would make the invisible visible and at the same time motivate visitors to jump the hurdle and link into works in virtual space using their own smart phones. The journey begins on the two dimensional plane and picks up terrain as the strategies for marketing the invisible leave the flat planes of the tour guide and begin to manifest on the three dimensional plane as complex sculpture “gates” that open up visitors to the virtual layer that surrounds them.

The one commonality between all of the strategies used to lure in the public, whether this be printed matter or actual objects, is a clever use of the QR Code. Although, many see the QR Code as something belonging to a past era of technology, it is however clearly anchored in society as a symbol that is immediately understood and its presents signals the complex procedure of scanning without having to use a single word in text.

In contrast, the alternative method of image recognition only works if the user knows that the image must be scanned in. However, this requires often a lengthy explanation and even once it becomes clear that the image needs to be scanned in and it is clear to the user what the results will be, the correct position of the camera lens to the image is something that often is not possible to explanation and requires that the boundaries of the image by marked in someway. Hence, a picture is worth a thousand words, but a QR Code is worth more!

BACKGROUND

All of the strategies for making invisible art visible were thought up for the Virtuale Switzerland, a festival for art created with augmented reality and presented in public space in different cities around the world.

What was unique about setting up and running the Virtuale was that I was forced to think outside of the box and had to not only deal with a completely new genre of art but also had to make creative use of the digital tools that were needed to view the artworks and to interact with them. Also, the process of accessing and viewing the works would have to be so designed that it would offer the public a participatory experience never before had elsewhere.

The program content for Virtuale always focused on the use of public space and the use of mobile communication technologies and did so in order to explore addressing a new type of audiences, which was simply part of public space and not necessarily an audience that would be specifically targeted for exhibitions of artworks. So whatever method was used to attract the audience to view the works in the exhibit that method had to be “playful” and at the same time offer a unique experience to ad hoc audience drawn from random public.

In terms of actual program content, the Virtuale expanded the offerings as new genres and methods of engagements were introduced. Platforming Augmented Reality art works became second nature and was expanded on by the introduction of Digital Heritage applications, which brought more interest from city marketing offices, because it made viable for us to show key landmarks in a city in a very new way. Urban gaming was introduced to provide to diversify participation and include a genre that was not tied to a fixed location. 

What made it interesting to others and which became a major growth factor in being able to fund the events was the fact that the program bridged areas such as art and technology, digital heritage and tourism, and digital culture and art mediation. This in turn offered art educators, tourist offices, and city marketing agencies something completely new and which they made use of to accomplish their goals of providing activities in the city which were appealing to visitors as well to residents.

Fig. 1: “The Coming of a New Dimension” an immersive AR work by Arthur Clay that was premiered during the CEBIT in Hannover in 2015.

MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

Over the years, I developed various new marketing strategies for the diverse festival editions that the Virtuale was producing. These included single projects such as the Metro-Next+ project that was shown in Grand Central Station during the Zurich Meets New York festival and the BioArt Chill Space “Biobbles” shown in Seoul, South Korea, as well as large festivals for invisible arts organized together with city marketing offices, offices for tourism, and museums.

Knowing that the artworks are installed with the use of satellites to position the works at any point around the world and are invisible to the naked eye, the challenge is obvious: Inform them so that they open their eyes through their smart phones. There are various ways of informing visitors to the exhibit about how they can view the works which include sending them the information per Email or providing a link to a website either with an URL or a QR Code that is scanned in. However, I noticed very early on that all of these methods work but how well they work is dependent on how much they motivate the visitors to click on, type in, or scam the URL to gain access.

The hurdles are there and are placed where they are hardly to be expected. The ability to use a smart devise is dependent on generation. Digital natives have less trouble than those born before the communication revolution. However persons who have a handicap --for example those confined to a wheel chair— have proved to be very adept at using an smart device and tend to be more update to date on new features, because they depend on them on a daily basis. 

Regardless, It remains a challenge because none of the works are visible to the naked eye and require a smart device to be seen. The predicament of marketing something that cannot be seen results in a somewhat ironic situation: On the one hand everyone has a smart device available to them in the form of a mobile phone but on the other hand, they have to know how to use the device correctly to be able to experience the exhibition. 

The first step to take independent of how adept a visitor is in using smart devices is to create a strategy with which the visitors must be attracted to something in real space that offers them the opportunity to easily access the artworks. Here, the best strategy is to create a physical object that is attractive and can act as “gateway” to the exhibition. It is the most effective strategy and motivated visitors to scan in the links simply because the gate is attractive in itself.

Physical object that have acted as gates in the past include posters, postcards, folding tour guides, small sculptures with integrated QR codes, and grand installations such as a metro station that allows you to virtually travel to the exhibition. Although, more costly and requiring much more effort, the larger the gate, the more it wakens people’s curiosity and attracts them into the exhibit.

FROM 2D AND 3D TO 4D

One of the important steps that was taken to make an exhibition for virtual artworks successful was the coupling of the exhibition with a program of public and private tours and to so by producing a clear tour guide that provided all information needed to access the works at the points at which they were placed. The integral design components of the tour guides included the QR Code to access the work, a sectioned map showing where the work is located, and information about the works and the artists who created them. For several of the tour guides created, color coded tour routes were provided so that visitors could gage what they wanted to see versus how long it took to make the tour.

Fig. 2: The tour guide from the Singapore Virtuale listing locations and offering access QR for all artworks installed in the city of Singapore. Colour groupings indicate the available tours.

The Permulations Posters

As needs changed, the concept of the tour guide was extended to explore the idea of creating a poster to act as a virtual museum. The idea was followed up on and resulted in the invention of what came to be termed the "Permulations Poster". The term was an adaption of the term “permulative graphics from the German graphic designer Christian Chruxin who worked with variance and space to achieve poster advertisement on billboards and ad column that had more breadth and depth.

At first, I though it more akin to the verb “perambulate” which basically means to travel through or round a place. Turning it into the noun “Perambulator” which In though would hint at that fact that the poster was offering a “walk round” a particular subject. At the same time, it seemed appropriate use of the term, because if we understand the QR Code to be a square, it references the common use of the verb i.e. to “perambulate or walk round an area (such as a square) in order to officially assert and record its boundaries.

Also, the two Permulations Posters that I designed were conceive as “Wiki Kiosks”, because the idea was to provide a small structure (a poster) and place it in a public area for providing information on a particular subject. Outside of a collection of URLs to fill the “Kiosk”, the design of a Permulations Poster required an iconic image of a personal, object, or even symbol, which would clearly associate with subject that is being addressed by the Permulations Poster.

As an example, the Permulations Poster developed for Transactional Art used the symbol of the dollar sign, which was depicted in a mosaic made out of a collection of QR Codes. Each of the QRs was in the proper color shading to bring the outline of the dollar sign into the foreground. Using a smart device, the viewer could select any one of the QRs and be led to a project site that involved a Transactional Art piece. Once viewers made their way through even a portion of the QRs offered, they reached a certain understanding on what Transactional Art is through the various websites, documentary, videos, interviews etc. that they had seen, reinforcing the concept worked and giving proof to the concept of a “perambulation” around a certain subject.

Another a thematic use Permulations Poster was informatics. Given the opportunity to create a poster around the research in informatics being undertaken at the ETH Zurich in general and in particular at the ETH Future Cities Lab in Singapore, I was led me to the choice of using an image of Einstein (who was educated at the ETH) as the key image for the poster. Again, I created a mosaic of QR codes but instead of forming a symbol, I coloured them and laid them over image of Einstein and adjusted the transparency so that the image was always to be seen but in diverse hue.

All in all, it was a fascinating as well as a compact way of exploring a theme using the poster as tactile media to guide viewers through a mass of information and a complex number of projects and let them gain an overview of a subject just by using their mobile phone and while standing at a single point in space while “traveling” only with the mind.

Interestingly enough, although the title of each of the projects were brought under each of the QR codes on the poster, visitors tended to want to explore per chance and scan in whatever QR code caught their eye. In this way, there was a pleasant element of surprise and a bit of fun as visitors tried to remember which QR Codes they had already scanned. Here, having the image integrated into the design helped visitors remember which QRs they had scanned, because the image was effective as a mnemonic device.

Fig. 3: The Transactional Art Permulations Poster designed by Arthur Clay for ETH's Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore for the Digital Artweeks International Festival in 2013.

The Sculptural Plane

After spending time using the QR Codes on the 2D planes for Tour Guides and Peramulations Posters, I began to take an interest in how the QR Code could be elevated onto the 3D plane by integrating it into small sculptures. For these works, I looked at the QR Code with my imagination so that I saw it more as textural pattern that could be used in an artwork rather than as a code that could be read in by a device.

This led to the creation of several sculptures that used the QR Code as an integral part.  The first sculpture I created was called “Bed Frames” and consisted of a serious of miniature beds frames cut out of clear acrylic glass and then used to house documentary photos taken in the 1930s of the daily work life in a feather bed factory in Northern Germany. The beds were quite small and the viewers had to use either a small magnifying glass or their mobile phones to view images printed on glass and located where the bed cover would be in an actual bed.

One of the beds was designed differently so it could be used to key visitors into the digital layer of the work. To make this possible, a visiting card was used as the bed cover instead of a photo. On the visiting card was the QR code and because it was repeated in series and housed in the frame of the bed it took on the appearance of a quilt. Visitors were welcome to take one of the visiting cards and scan it in to view the digital layer of the work which consisted of falling feathers with textural patterns won from the same documentary photos used in the other beds.

Fig. 4: Entitled "BedFrames", the work as part of a digital heritage initiative to offer a new strategy for experiencing a collection of photographs documenting the work culture of women employees at a bed feather factory in Northern Germany before the war.

The bed frame work with the visiting cards was constructed out of three parts: a bed frame made out of laser cut acrylic glass and a bed cover in the form of a “visit card”. The bed was placed onto square piece of acrylic glass printed with the QR Code. It appeared as if it was a carpet upon which the bed was placed. Visitors could scan the large QR of sculpture from above with a smart phone and open the virtual layer of sculpture or they could take one of the “bed cover visit cards” and view the layer any where and at their own convenience.

In homage to the factory, the virtual layer of the sculpture consisted of a flock of feathers falling from the sky downward. Each of the feathers was textured with one of the documentary photos from the collection. Visitors could walk around the exhibit and view all of the photos from the collection; when touching any one of the feathers (the screen of the smartphone), a web page would open up with the original photo and information about it. In this manner, the work was educational in manner and a good example of how heritage can be communicated through arts.

Fig. 5: A screen shot of the virtual layer from the BedFrame project. Depicted is one of the many falling and floating feathers that is textured with one of the historic photos from the collection depicting the work life of women at a bed feather factory in Northern Germany.

From New York to Zurich

The largest project to date that I created and which used an very elaborate gate for entering virtual space was a project that was set up in Grand Central Station in New York City. The project went under the title "Metro-Next+" and consisted of a collection of Augmented Reality works from diverse artists working in AR. The key feature of the exhibit was a life-size Metro Station that offered visitors the possibility of virtually traveling from New York City to downtown Zurich.

What was key to the metro station in terms of making it work as a gate way was a clever twist to the standard information expected on a metro station entry way. At the front of the entryway one read: “Grand Central with service to Zurich”. Next to this a WLAN Symbol was placed. On the sides of the entry way, there were two signs upon which one could read “Subway” and next to it was the QR Code that one needed to scan in to get into the exhibition. All in all, it was self explanatory.

Once the QR was scanned in, instructions were provided to either view a collection of ART artworks or to take a virtual trip to Zurich. If the trip was chosen, a panoramic image of the Augustinergasse, a medieval lane that is one of the best known visitor attractions of the oldest area of the city of Zürich.

Fig. 6. The mock Metro Station project by Arthur Clay that used virtuality to take visitors from New York to Zurich which was set up in Grand Central Station during the "Zurich Meets New York" festival. Funded by the ETH Zurich, the project also offered an extensive number of AR artworks by artists from Switzerland and the USA.

The metro station made many people passing by in Grand Central very curious, because everyone knew that it was clearly impossible to travel from New York to Zurich per Subway. For this reason, it was a curiosity that people gladly lined up to pose in front of the station and get their picture taken or to make a Selfie. After the Selfies were taken, a large percent of these people found their way into the exhibition, because once they found out what the station was actually capable doing, they became eager to take a virtual trip to Zurich on New York Subway.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, it is easy for me to admit that the theoretical basis behind much of transition on the 2D plane can be attributed to the ground breaking work of the German graphic designer, Christian Chruxin who believed and demonstrated through his work that statics can have movement by appearing as variations.

It was Chruxin’s concept of “multispective” that led me to adopting his concepts of the permutative poster and to extend using new technologies so that the experience of viewing a “poster” was forced to go beyond the static and become something more capable of deep engagement, able to hold higher quantities of information, and offer it all to the viewer in a mix of media from text to interactive 3D AR graphics.

Quickly running over the objects and artworks presented in this article, adopting the purposes of a poster and transforming them into an object by shifting from the vertical to the horizontal plane (posters are hung at the vertical and sculptures rest on the horizontal plane) led me to go many steps further with the concepts of the permutative and develop something innovative and fitting to the needs of the times.

Clearly, the communication tools in our hands today offer great opportunity to expand the concept of communication and enhance it with much more variance and content than ever before. To attract the general public and to motivate to enter new virtual spaces is the real challenge, but once it is done and done with a sense of creativity and with the convenience and freedom that a smart phone offers, a new era opens up where the academic notion of a poster session is elevated far beyond and steps into a world where even poltergeist can be platformed.

Arthur Clay, Basel May, 2020

#virtualeswitzerland #invisiblearts #christianchruxin