My new piece in AUGMENTED AURA at the Installation Space gallery in North Adams, Mass. combines physical sculpture with an AR component, in this case images displayed on your smartphone using the Hoverlay app. The piece, Augmented Hunting Costume for the Alpha Female, suggests the extravagant fashion a female coyote might design for herself, once interspecies communication becomes the norm in the future. Conceptualized around my co-curator Karen Meninno’s chintz design authored in MidJourney, the fabric’s elements were separated in Photoshop and introduced into a Hoverlay Space geolocated at the entrance to the gallery, where they can be viewed by reading a QR code posted in the window.
This is the first time I’ve attempted to augment a sculpture on my own using Hoverlay. The new version is easier to use than previous versions, but it doesn’t seem to support animated gifs, which was my original intention for the AR images. I also found that it was helpful for me to designate particular spots from which to view the images after scanning the QR code in the store window. In this case, that meant taping graphics onto the sidewalk. Viewed too close up, the images were large enough to block out the piece—though this meant they were approximately the size I’d designated for them when plotting my Hoverlay space. Although I designed the Hoverlay space entirely remotely (the gallery is in the Berkshires and I am in East/Central Mass.), I did find it straightforward and mostly accurate.
Hoverlay has many possibilities for artists and filmmakers, more samples are on the website.
A working sculptor 