Learning & Leading Through Technology

Imagine this: You are wandering through an art gallery when you come upon a new exhibit of student art. You can tell right away that this is not your typical display. Some of the works appear to be traditional paintings and photographs, but some pieces look only half-finished, and others appear to be merely nameplates on an expanse of blank wall.

What’s more, none of your fellow gallery-goers is looking directly at the artwork. Instead, they are all holding digital devices—some tablets, some smartphones—on which they are viewing videos, photographs, and other digital art. Some seem to be listening to recordings through earbuds and headphones.

You have stumbled on an augmented-reality (AR) art gallery, or ARt gallery.

The other visitors are tied to their screens because that’s where at least some of the art happens, through the digital magic of AR.

How ARt Works

Immersive reality is everywhere. We are surrounded by meta-information sources that blend with our physical lives through the mobile devices that are with us at all times. AR is an expression of this immersive reality in that it facilitates the real-time association of all that meta-information with our physical lives. In other words, AR blends real life (RL) with virtual reality (VR).

The world of AR is made up of triggers and overlays. Triggers are the RL components—such as quick-response (QR) codes or a painting on the wall—that summon the meta-media overlays to come down from the cloud to the user’s device.

Two kinds of triggers predominate in the world of AR: GPS and visual.

With GPS-based AR, your device’s GPS might tell your AR app that you are standing in front of a particular restaurant, which triggers the overlay of today’s lunch specials to appear on your screen. Visually triggered AR involves using a mobile device to look at something in RL, such as a piece of artwork, which triggers a digital overlay, like a video, to appear on the screen. AR can also be triggered by your voice, which is why people talk to their Google Glass. AR will inevitably expand to include other nonvisual triggers as well, such as touch and body movement.

In the case of an ARt gallery, RL + VR = ARt. This could play out in a number of ways. For example, you could hold up your tablet’s camera to view a painting—the trigger—and your AR app might fill up with such overlays as a video of the artist explaining the process she used to create the painting or a piece of digital art that integrates with the art on the gallery wall.

ASTE’s ARt Galleries

Two years ago, the Alaska Society for Technology in Education (ASTE), ISTE’s Alaska affiliate, began a conference artist-in-residence program called ASTE as Art. The intention was to bring professional artists and students together to create digital art that could be displayed or performed at the ASTE annual conference. The inspiration was honoring the fact that digital expression has turned our everyday mediascape into an art gallery.

A world of webpages, Flickr photo
feeds, You Tube presentations, and
other forms of media collage make
up the new normal, begging us to
recognize art as the next foundational
literacy. ASTE as Art supported this
notion by raising the visibility of art
and showing how it can humanize and
expand the digital landscape.

Our program, which began in 2012, featured the work of composer Craig Harris, the photo artistry of Candy Kuhn, and the efforts of a number of high school students. We all worked together to produce a media collage based on interviews, photos, and video data about the future of technology and learning that we collected throughout the conference. You can see the results at jasonOhler.com/itsabout.

In our second year (2013), we faced budget cutbacks. As manager of the ASTE as Art program, I was forced to get creative—always a good challenge for an art program! Instead of hiring a specific artist, we turned K– 12 students into a “collective artist in virtual residence.” I put out a call for ARtwork and received an overwhelming response from across Alaska as well as from Massachusetts, Missouri, Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Czech Republic.

Since the ARt gallery installation at ASTE, I have also hosted another show at ISTE 2013. Both traffic and enthusiasm were again very high at ISTE, so more installations are on the way, including a joint project with digital storytelling expert Bernajean Porter at the National Art Education Association Conference in March in San Diego, California.