Critical Interventions into Canonical Spaces: Augmented Reality at the 2011 Venice and Istanbul Biennials

In 2011, using the recently developed mobile technology of geolocated augmented reality (AR), the author was the primary organizer of two interventions into art biennials: in Venice together with Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek for our cyberartist group Manifest.AR (Manifest.AR blog 2013) and in Istanbul in collaboration with the Istanbul design team (PATTU 2013). With geolocated AR artists can place virtual computer graphic artworks at specific locations via the site’s GPS coordinates. The artwork can then be viewed by anyone on site in the display of a smartphone or mobile enabled tablet as an overlay on the live camera view, merged with the surroundings as if the artwork was there in real life. Both Venice and Istanbul – bound together through centuries of often contentious history – are spectacular cityscapes and sites of former empire. They continue to fascinate not only for their spectacular settings and artifacts of their past glory, but also for their cultural presence in the globalized contemporary art world. The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, is the world’s oldest art biennial and arguably the city’s main claim to relevance as a contemporary international destination. Istanbul, long in decline after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, has been reinvigorated in the past decades by Turkey’s rising political and economic power. Its art biennial, founded in 1987, is a showcase for Istanbul’s new position as a dynamic center of contemporary international culture.