Boston Cyberarts has commissioned five artists–John Craig Freeman, Kristin Lucas, Will Pappenheimer, Mark Skwarek, and Tamiko Thiel – to create 10 augmented reality (AR) sculptures for The Augmented Landscape, an outdoor exhibition to take place at the National Park Service’s Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Located on the historic waterfront in Salem, MA, the free exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, May 27, and remain on view through November 30, 2017. 

“I’m thrilled to be bringing this groundbreaking new work, created by five of the foremost international practitioners of augmented reality (AR), to the city of Salem, and the more than 450,000 annual visitors to the park,” says Boston Cyberarts Director George Fifield. “This is an exciting expansion of our collaboration with the National Park Service presenting public art in the Greater Boston area. Cyberarts has been programming the LED screen on the Boston Harbor Island Welcome Center on the Greenway since 2014. Bringing AR sculpture to the landscape at the NPS’s Salem site this summer will be a dynamic new direction for public art in New England.” 

Augmented reality is computer-generated sound, video or graphics that are layered into a real-world environment. Sited throughout the park, either on the land and or in Salem harbor, the sculptures will be positioned via GPS, each in a specific place on the Salem campus, and viewable by using the augmented reality application Layar (free for iOS and Android) on a smartphone or tablet. 

The National Park Service will have printed maps available for visitors that include the site of each piece, an image, artists’ information, title of the work and how to download the app to view the work. The information will also be available online, at the Boston Cyberarts and NPS websites. The NPS will have tablets or smartphones available for checkout. Visits to the site are free to the public. 

The Augmented Landscape is supported in part by a $10,000 Art Works matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and funds from the Salem Cultural Council.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

John Craig Freeman has more than twenty-five years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. Freeman seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place. He has produced work and exhibited around the world including in London, Mexico City, Calgary, Havana, Kaliningrad, Warsaw, Zurich, Belfast, Venice, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Milano, Sydney, Singapore, Liverpool, Coimbra, Basel, Paris, across America, as well as in Beijing, Xi'an, Wuhan, and Hong Kong. In 2016 he traveled to Wuhan, China as part of the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator. In 2015, he was the recipient of a commission from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology program. He has also had work commissioned by Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. The NEA awarded Freeman one of the last Individual Artist Fellowships in 1992. Freeman received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently a Professor of New Media Art at Emerson College in Boston. www.JohnCraigFreeman.net

Kristin Lucas makes work about the blurring boundary between the body and technology, further complicated by issues of gender and ties to a global economy. Through an embodied practice, she investigates the uncanny and liminal spaces of our everyday interactions with systems and technologies in circuitous works that lie somewhere between reality and “reality.” Lucas's work has been presented nationally and internationally at galleries and museums, including Dia Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space (New York), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City), DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show (Houston), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (Liverpool), House of Electronic Arts (Basel), Nam June Paik Art Center (Gyeonggi-do), XPO Gallery (Paris), and ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe); and at festivals, including: Fusebox Festival (Austin), ISEA (Manchester/Liverpool); Transmediale Festival (Berlin), Visions of the Now Festival (Stockholm), and more. Lucas is represented by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Postmasters Gallery in New York, and And/Or Gallery in Los Angeles. www.KristinLucas.com

Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn-based artist working in new media, performance, and installation with an interest in institutional or spatial intervention and the altered meaning of things. His work often explores the confluence and tension of the virtual and physical worlds. He is a founding member of the Manifest.AR collective. His projects and performances have been shown internationally at Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, Los Angeles; San Francisco MOMA; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul; Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zurich; Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles; the ICA, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; FILE, Sao Paulo, BR; Turbulance.org; Xi’an Academy of Art Gallery in China; and Exit Art, the New Museum and the 2017 Moving Image Art fair in New York. The artist’s works have been reviewed in Christiane Paulʼs recent historical edition of “Digital Art,” a chapter of Gregory Ulmerʼs theoretical book “Electronic Monuments,” Art in America, The New York Times, Hyperallergic.org, WIRED, Modern Painters, the Boston Globe, EL PAIS, Madrid, Liberation, Paris, and Art US. He teaches new and locative media at Pace University, New York. www.willpap-projects.com

Mark Skwarek is an artist working to bridge the gap between virtual and physical world with augmented reality. His art explores the translation our everyday digital experience into the physical world using mobile augmented reality.  He organized the augmented reality artist group manifest.AR, the arOCCUPYWALLSTREET movement, co-organized We AR in MoMA, and is the chief executive of SemblanceART. Skwarek’s practice is also largely based in art activism with emerging technologies. He has a long record of international augmented reality work, ranging from “erasing” the DMZ battlements between North and South Korea (a piece he did on site), to the virtual elimination of the barricades between Palestine and Israel, at the Gaza Strip. He has created political work and symbols in a variety of locations across the United States, including pieces at Wall St., U.S. Mexico Border and the Whitehouse to name a few. Skwarek earned his M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design's Digital Media Department. He is director of New York University’s Mobile Augmented Reality Lab and professor in the Integrated Digital Media Program. His work has been written about by the New York Times, Art in America, Boing Boing, WIRED, the Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, NPR, BBC, Leonardo, and Creative Capital. www.markskwarek.com

Tamiko Thiel is an internationally acknowledged pioneer in creating poetic spaces of memory for exploring social and cultural issues in both virtual reality art (VR, since 1994) and augmented reality art (AR, since 2010). A founding member of the artist group Manifest.AR, she participated in their path-breaking guerrilla AR intervention at MoMA NY in 2010, and was main curator and organizer of their uninvited intervention into the Venice Biennial in 2011. Her works have also been shown at the Istanbul Biennale, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, ICA London, ICA Boston, and art fairs such as Art Gwangju, Contemporary Istanbul, UNPAINTED Munich and Moving Image New York. Her VR and AR works are featured in reference books such as Whitney curator Christiane Paul's "Digital Art" and Stanford professor Matthew Smith's "The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace." Her work has been supported by the McDowell Colony, MIT Fellowship, IBM Innovation Award, WIRED Magazine, Japan Foundation Fellowship and Berlin Capital City Fund. As AR artistic advisor to the CCCADI, she helped secure a Rockefeller Cultural Innovation award for the "Mi Querido Barrio" AR project in East Harlem. In 2017 she is an Eyebeam New York Mentor and GoogleVR Tilt Brush Artist in Residence. www.tamikothiel.com

ABOUT SALEM MARITIME NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Salem Maritime National Historic Site was designated in 1937, the first National Historic Site in the National Park system. The nine-acre site includes the homes of merchant and mariner families, the US Custom House in which the famous author National Hawthorne worked, and a replica of the three-masted cargo vessel Friendship of Salem. Today, the park rangers, staff and volunteers of Salem Maritime continue to inform and inspire visitors with the maritime history of New England and the United States. For more information visit www.nps.gov/sama or call 978-740-1650.

ABOUT BOSTON CYBERARTS 

Boston Cyberarts supports and encourages experimentation in the arts through exhibitions, events, educational programs and collaboration with like-minded groups in an effort to foster the development of new practices in contemporary art making. The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is located in the Green Street station on the MBTA's Orange line in Jamaica Plain. The gallery is the only art space located in a train station in the country, and also the only independent art organization in Massachusetts focusing on new and experimental media. Boston Cyberarts runs two public art projects in downtown Boston; Art on the Marquee at the BCEC, and the art on the LED screens on the Harbor Island Welcome Pavilion located in Boston's Greenway Conservancy and run by the National Park Service and the Harbor Island Now.

Boston Cyberarts is grateful for the support of many generous individuals and institutions, including the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, and the Boston Cultural Council.

Further information on Boston Cyberarts, including how to make a donation, is available by visiting www.bostoncyberarts.org, or contacting info@bostoncyberarts.org, 617-522-6710.