Dialogue City Episode #008: Katie Pearce from Buds of Buds on Art and Augmented Reality

When you think of art, you don’t always think about augmented reality. Katie Pearce recently sat down with Dialogue City to talk about Buds of Buds, an art collective that’s creating content beyond your traditional art pieces. For example, take their latest creation, the Northern Reflections Art Exhibition, which ran for all of December 2017 along Stephen Avenue from City Hall to Bankers Hall. They’ve not only painted windows with various holiday artwork, but you can download their Augle app from iTunes or Google and overlay animation on top of the painted landscapes. They’ve combined everything into one: augmented reality, promoting local artists, promoting local businesses, creating accessible urban art for all demographics, and have combined the talents of not only artists, but programmers and animators as well.

One of their first projects revolved around painting windows during the Calgary Stampede. If you ever grew up in Calgary, there’s this ongoing tradition of painting windows for the Calgary Stampede with cartoon-ish caricatures. They took that tradition but allowed individual artists to express themselves via an exhibition.

When we combine people from all different backgrounds including painters, developers, animators , graphic designers, project managers, the possibilities of interaction and creation are endless. We’ve got the space, we’ve got the talent, we’ve got the technological depth, so what’s holding us back from advancing and combining different media forms and technologies?

Future of augmented reality

Our discussion also takes us into the ethics of augmented reality and just how far we as a human species want to take augmented reality. Do we want to immerse ourselves to the point where we cannot differentiate between what is real and what is not real?

Tools that are offered now are rapidly advancing, which will make augmented reality that much more easier to experiment and develop. So as artists and developers start to dabble in this medium, the possibilities and potential to take concepts and ideas to create new art forms. Many of our questions and conversations take us on the ethics and application of AR, and those are listed in the questions below for our readers to take away.

Questions for our readers:

• Would you want to see more creative hubs that host people from different backgrounds in the same space rather than silo-ing sectors?
• Would the cross-contamination of these ideas (as discussed in the above point) create more opportunities?
• How do we apply augmented reality to showcase the past of a city or where a building used to be?
• Will augmented reality be embraced or will it be a tool for destruction or to be fearful of? Examples would be if things were hacked and AR were to overlay a sewer cover but in reality it is not really there, or if there was a way to cover things that we don’t want to see like panhandlers as an example?
• What will the final format of AR look like? How do we police the future of AR as it becomes more mainstream in the future?
• What do we as individuals want with AR and immersive environments rather than being imposed by companies or algorithms?
• How do we handle AR graffiti, trolling, and bullying (similar to social media)?
• How would be able to use AR in the future to facilitate protests, conferences, and events for those who may not be able to physically be there?
• Will AR be able to remove the physical spatial geography that isolates us at times (i.e. family members living somewhere else, visiting friends)?
• Will you be able to tell the subtle differences between something that is real and unreal?
• Do we have a moral and social responsibility when it comes to social media or in augmented reality with our content creation?
• What are the limits or what will be the limits of censorship in different media?

We want to thank Katie for taking time out of her day to come chat with us. You can connect with Buds of Buds by visiting their website, Facebook, and Twitter.

You can find this episode and more on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. Reach us on Twitter, Facebook, and via email at dialoguecity@gmail.com.

Show notes

1. MakeFashion is based on Calgary where they create wearable tech garments. They combine fashion designers, engineers, artists, and tech enthusiasts in the development of fashion and integrating technology into it.
2. Rainforest Alberta is a coming together of entrepreneurs (primarily in the technological space) and their advancement of business development in the area of innovation and the technological ecosystem.
3. Augmented reality or AR (taken from Wikpedia) is “a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, ideally across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory. The overlaid sensory information can be constructive (i.e. additive to the natural environment) or destructive (i.e. masking of the natural environment) and is spatial registered with the physical world such that it is perceived as an immersive aspect of the real environment.” The game Pokemon Go would be an example of AR.
4. Off Centre Centre is the New Gallery in Calgary now.
5. Unity 3D and the unreal engine are applications and tools that help individuals design and build games, simulations, and visualizations.
6. Haptic feedback (from Wikipedia) recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user.
7. An example of the emotional manipulation of social media can be found in this Guardian article where Facebook reveals its experiment on social media users’ emotions via its news feed, and the actual link to the study can be found here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
8. Dynamic audio translation is real time translator via a computer versus the traditional human translator.
9. Agoraphobia (taken from Wikipedia) is “an anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives the environment to be unsafe with no easy way to get away.
10. More about simulacrum or simulacra as it relates to androids and the philosophical thoughts about that can be found in this Wikipedia article.
11. Uncanny Valley (taken from Wikipedia) is “a hypothesis that human replicas that appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit feelings of eeriness and revulsion among some observers.
12. Anthropomorphism (taken from Wikipedia) is “the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology.”
13. Westworld (taken from Wikipedia) is a “story takes place in the fictional Westworld, a technologically advanced Wild West-themed amusement park populated by android hosts. Westworld caters to high-paying guests, who may indulge in whatever they wish within the park, without fear of retaliation from the hosts.”
14. The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel about an invasion of Earth from Martian species. BBC had broadcast a reading of this over the radio and many listeners thought it was a real event that was happening.
15. Logan Paul is a popular YouTube content creator that has come under fire for uploading a video of him finding a body hanging from a tree in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest. More information can be found here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/youtube-logan-paul-statement-1.4480568