Last year I read William Gibson’s latest novel Spook Country (it either came out last year or in 2007 I don’t remember – but I had to wait to fetch my signed copy from London before I could read it). One of the concepts that was explored is locative art. The idea of having digital art fixed at a position in the real world, you have VR goggles or something similar so you can ‘see’ the art within the real world.
Now there are a few references to this around on the internet, and there are similar projects that have been made (real world Quake at a university in South Australia is a good example), but so far I’ve not seen anything that comes close to what I really want. I did see something similar in part of a video on current HP research areas which basically involved holding up a special tablet PC to a wall and being able to see the pipes and what not running through it, but what I really want is to be able to rock up to some location with my phone and look at the digital art. My favourite example from Spook Country is one artist who digitally recreated the deaths of famous individuals (River Phoenix is one example) at the location where it actually happened. A little creepy to be sure, but this is basically what I’d like to see actually happening.
Since no one else seems to be making my geek dreams come true maybe I should work on this myself. So, if you have any skills in 3D modelling, geometric triangulation technology (we’re talking at least centimetre, if not millimetre, range here) then I could probably do with a lot of help, let me know. Of course this may be another pipe dream, but let’s see how we go.
