(translated by Kate Willman)
Augmented Reality (AR) is a medium based on geolocation, computer vision, the use of specific apps (Aurasma, Blipper) and a mobile device (smartphone, tablet). In the last few years, it has seen a significant increase because of its epiphanic potential in visualising information, moving images, animations and videos that come from the images captured with your smartphone, for example.
Although it is primarily used at the moment by the corporate sector – in brand-oriented micronarratives to keep consumers loyal through gaming (here) – AR is being used more and more by video artists and graphic designers to offer engaging experiences that aim to reconfigure the relationship between user, objects and urban spaces in a performative way.
This dimension has been extensively developed and reinvigorated by Komplex-Live Cinema Group (Mariano Equizzi, Paolo Bigazzi Alderigi, Luca Liggio), who have been using AR since 2013 to create evocative digital shows that have resemanticised objects, spaces and urban areas, linking them to literary, artistic and cinematic imaginaries. Komplex develops urban storytelling based on creating content and dispersing it through urban spaces, in a way that transforms the city into a text to be rewritten intermedially: from the “triggered” areas (geolocatable on the Aurasma platform), archival or original audio-visual material, literary texts, photographs, animations, graphics created on the computer and music emerge and blend together, transforming the facades of buildings, architectural views and monuments into surfacing media.
Komplex’s works are permanently sewn onto urban spaces; they are ready to be “awakened” by the presence of the user in search of the dispersed content, who follows his/her own paths, forming around them a non-linear, fragmented narrative broken down into nodes.
The narratives are mainly reminiscent of cyberpunk and mystery, as in 28, which was dispersed in the Vanchiglia area in Turin, The Disappearance of Hagan Arnold, inspired by the character in the science fiction film Project X (1968) and dispersed in Sofia, and U-Qube (designed for the second edition of the Sicily Web Fest), which combines mythology and Pythagorean numerology (here).
Their most recent project is Cthulhu – An Investigation on Very Low Frequencies in L’Aquila. It is a series of shows inspired by the literary myth of Cthulhu and it is dispersed on the buildings of the city and the places that are still “hurt” by the earthquake of 2009.
By pointing your smartphone, for example, at the sixteenth-century Spanish fort, the Park Auditorium, the Fontana Luminosa (Luminous Fountain) and the fountain in the piazza in front of the cathedral, and so on, you will see Cthulhu emerge, accompanied by excerpts from novels by H. P. Lovecraft and video clips of Angelo Cerchi (a scholar who has been decoding Lovecraft’s mythology for years) (here is the user’s experience). Meanwhile, the sound design, by Paolo Bigazzi Alderigi, works suggestively on very low telluric frequencies – sounds that, as some scientists have ironically stated, could in fact confirm the existence of Cthulhu – enriching users’ multisensorial stimulation. The user therefore accesses a dense intermedial fabric of different expressive codes that blend with the urban areas, so that the imaginary of early twentieth-century horror literature is updated performatively.
Because of the richness of the codes, formats, sounds and images that are woven together, a project like Cthulhu can be considered an example of intermedia fiction: a narrative organised on a dense fabric of interartistic references that, aside from the clear reference to Lovecraft’s literature, recalls Situationism, video art in the style of Fluxus, the material conceptualism of Lucio Fontana, the narrative labyrinths of Borges, the conspiracy theories of Pynchon and much cyber culture.
This linguistic and expressive eclecticism recalls the idea of the “intermedial network” that André Gaudreault (2004) used to describe the medial indeterminacy that characterised early cinema, which was constructed by interweaving theatrical spectatorship, literary imaginaries, live soundtracks and the implementation of photographic technologies.
The use of the artistic, linguistic and narrative potential of AR, as in Cthulhu by Komplex, clearly illustrates the intermedial unrest – still free from fixed stabilisations – that characterises the contemporary mediosphere populated by hybrid media that blend together diverse artistic forms and experiences.
