The augmented reality (AR) is one of those hyped-up terms that seems to become persistent in our collective imagination of the near future - mostly thanks to big tech media conglomerates like Meta and their restless attempts to put the eye-candy blinds onto our eyes, immersing us in so called metaverse. Ironically the same social platform is responsible for dissemination of all sorts of fake news and misinformation - thus in fact right now augmenting the perception of shared reality.
As I'm not a fan of AR as a trivial overlay displayed via the headsets and even more so not a fan of the problem of augmentation of the the facts through social media I've decided to create a piece that will physically manifest the issue using a bit less obvious means.
The sculpture works by combining a 3d-printed form resembling a sundial gnomon that's attached onto the surface of the epaper screen. Since I have an exact 3d model of the physical object I'm then able to generate an augmented shadow (using old school open source pov-ray engine) that is displayed on the e-paper display according to current time of day and (intentionally) wrong sun position at any given coordinates as if it's casted by the actual object.
The final step is to convert the black and white image of the shadow into a grid of custom-designed pixel font characters in the vein of ASCII art and fill it with the words coming from latest fake news headlines sourced via Google Fact Check API - thus generating never ending stream of misinformation casting the ever-changing "shadow of a doubt" augmenting the sculpture.
This data-driven object combines tradition of concrete poetry with new media and current context of post-truth society and misinformation.
Sample fake-news shadows:
