In the Augmented Reality (AR) experience currently embedded at the iconic Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne immersive technology is used to connect the iconic gardens to an international network of venues, simultaneously hosting the interactive exhibition. Seeing the Invisible which “address(es) themes of nature, the environment and sustainability, and exploring the boundaries and connections between art, technology and nature, the exhibition features 13 immersive virtual works by established and emerging artists including Ai Weiwei, Refik Anadol, Sarah Meyohas, El Anatsui, Mohammed Kazem, Sigalit Landau, Timur Si-Qin and Australia’s Mel O’Callaghan” can be accessed via a free app available for both IOS and Android mobile devices (Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, 2022). The immediate benefit of the digital format of the exhibition is to allow the communication and collaboration of creators and audiences of texts to critically connect diverse global agendas and approaches to the themes addressed.
Giannini and Bowen share this sentiment, recently documenting the expansion of the concept of authorship and text in response to greater digital integration and human digitality.
“Digital artists, whose presence in museums seems sorely lacking, must now assume a more central role in the digital integration and visualization of human digitality. While information and technology services can be outsourced or remote, curators remain at the heart of defining collection content and context but need the collaboration of artists on new narratives and ways of thinking, which in turn enable museums to reimagine collections in ways that encourage museums to engage with more diverse communities, artists, and audiences. (Giannini & Bowen, 2022)
Digital Literature must be open to new narratives and boundary spanning praxis that often questions conventions and transforms expectations of established cultural forms.
Co-curator of the international project, Haras Maor has said the exhibition focuses on a timely and increasingly complicated relationship which is “created on this tension between the physical and the digital, what we would then perhaps term the phygital” (Libbey, P. 2021). This phygital space is significant as “the interplay of these augmented reality works in vibrant natural settings breaks down the binary between what is often considered ‘natural’ versus ‘digital’, and in this way provides an exhibition experience that is much more connected to the way we live today.”
Meliss Gronlund of the The National also highlights the significance of creating opportunities for critical thinking, as “the show also points to botanical gardens as fascinating subjects in themselves; they became fashionable during European colonialism, and often host microcosms of biomes transplanted from elsewhere in the world – making them transnational entities in themselves” (Gronlund, 2021). It is this exploration of the intersection between inherited history and transnational identity that reinforces the cosmopolitan approach towards commons and community as active, alive, transplanted and transforming, impacting and influencing the people who pass through them.
I felt this concept of passage and transformation was manifested in the work Biome Gateway (2021) by New York-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent, Timur Si-Qin. The artist has contributed much to the theorisation of boundary spanning praxis in the arts space post internet. In an interview with Martin De Landa, Si-Qin discusses “metamaterialism” in the fine arts as an inevitable response to intertextuality:
“Everything became text. Kristeva and Derrida and so on were just talking about intertextuality. Even the weather doesn’t exist, it is what we make of it, what we interpret of it. Everything became virtual in a way…We need to acknowledge that we’ve built these layers of virtuality and that they are real, they are real virtual. They might not be actual but they are real still but that all of them are running on top of a material basis that ultimately informs the source of power and the basis of society.“(De Landa & Si-Qin, 2006).
Entering into and passing through the cave-like spaces of Biome Gateway one feels a sense of wonder and of being transported into a world that has been discovered. This sense of discovery is shaped and guided by the structures of augmented reality which leads the audience as reader to interpret with curiosity the connections and implications between the sacred, nature and human narrative. Ultimately, the work is exemplary in the use of immersive technology to revitalise the audience as participants in the emerging spaces and stories of a “phygital” age.
References
De Landa, M. (Interviewee), & Si-Qin, T. (Interviewer) (2012). Manuel de Landa in Conversation with Timur Si-Qin [Interview transcript]. Timur Si-Qin. http://timursiqin.com/manuel-de-landa-in-conversation-with-timur-si-qin
Giannini, T. & Bowen, J.P. (2022). Museums and digital culture: From reality to digitality in the age of COVID-19. Heritage 2022, 5(1), 192–214. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage5010011
Gronlund, M. (2021, July 8).Seeing the invisible: augmented reality exhibition to take place across six countries. The National. https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/2021/07/08/seeing-the-invisible-augmented-reality-exhibition-to-take-place-across-six-countries/
Libbey, P. (2021, June 30). Art to augment 12 botanical gardens around the world. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/arts/design/botanical-gardens-ai-weiwei.html
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. (n.d.) Seeing the invisible. https://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/cranbourne-gardens/what-s-on-cranbourne/seeing-the-invisible/