This piece deals with the physical dislocation evoked by the conference hotel experience. Moving between rooms, spaces, and venues requires a personal encounter with the labyrinthine structure of a vast hotel hyper-space: seemingly endless corridors, brightly lit glass elevators and escalators, tunnels, bypasses, rooms, and halls of connected activities and events.
Nowhere explores the particular sense of disorientation and anxiety that conference spaces evoke. It was originally created for the AR2View augmented-reality project, Video in the Built Environment at the College Art Association conference in New York in January 2013.
AR2View is an exhibition catalog bringing together augmented-reality artworks by nineteen media artists and two essays reviewing the field and the work inside. Unlike most catalogs, its pages link to media artwork wherever the viewer and catalog happen to be. It follows the experimental format of Scan2Go, distributed in Los Angeles at CAA’s 100th Annual Conference.
AR2View pushes the connection between the page interface and artists’ work by using the conference hotel as the context and trigger for experiencing artworks. Photographs in the catalog trigger digital media artwork through image recognition, creating a composite view in which computer-generated media is overlaid on the camera image.