Mixed Reality ARts Project

a new reality, a mixed bag

Our summer 2020 City of Toronto SPARK project was planned to take place in North York, before the pandemic changed everything. How would we meet? How would it feel to create together from a distance? What new opportunities did this present? Once we leaned into the fact that geography, presence and collaboration no longer has the same meaning, it was clear that emerging technology of augmented reality would help us bridge the gap between physical place and virtual space.

image as portal

Leveraging the power of image-recognition technology, participants documented and animated images in their surroundings, including textiles, video game boxes, book covers, drawings, painting and signs (some works below, and more on our youtube shorts feed. Using Artivive App, they shared their works in progress with each other, who viewed from their homes all over the GTA, and having many fascinating conversations along the way, about the future of media and the spatial web.

mail art

With a storied history of mail art at Never Gallery Ready, we decided we would use postcard prints and the post office to engage audiences from a safe distance within their homes, bringing some much needed magic to those suffering from the isolation of lock down measures and quarantines. Creating 40+ works of augmented reality, we printed 18 final works on 250 postcards and sent them all around the City of Toronto’s 6 boroughs, throughout Canada and around the world.

Project Feature of participant Atina Ali

Participant Feature of Ashwah Aslam

Participant feature of Fatima Mujahid

CHECK OUT LOTS MORE Experiments in augmented reality by viewing our youtube shorts

This is a City of Toronto SPARK project

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