Wordplay in between reality
Poetic AR is a project developed by Imagination of Things to investigate the creative connections between poetry and augmented reality and experiment with its overlapping possibilities. As a play studio, we are interested in the power of technology to make metaphors. Though today AR is interpreted as casual, ephemeral visual experiences, as a medium it is a powerful invitation to blur boundaries and create alternative worlds and narratives.
Besides developing AR experiences and collaborating with a few poets and spoken word artists in Amsterdam, we organized a workshop that embodied this premise, bringing together poets and creatives. Meta-versing.
We approach augmented reality as a creative tool that we can fill with play and poetics. To create prompts that challenge what our phone camera can see and breathe meaningful moments into overwhelming social media platforms.
Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things, it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry, in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest.
This definition from Brittanica is helpful to set the tone of our approach, to start seeing AR as a way to enable, shape, and spark these rituals/moments/experiences and reconcile with the ancient quality of poetry.
Words occupy spaces, build worlds, cultivate imagery, and create a necessary dictionary for survival and resilience.
Let us imagine a gentle intensity
Where the poetry of man, machine and menace
Are neither luxuries nor coin
Let us pause the game of dancing chairs
Always Revolving,
Turning
Often losing our footing.
This is an invitation to rejoice and rejoin.Baldwin once said that
Imagination creates the situation.
And more often that not,
The situation creates the imagination.
So let us augment our steps,
With a gentle intensity,
A creative complexity,
Compassionate propensity.
Let us talk back to the machines,
As if they know
The poetry
Of the times
And of the wind
They blow.So lets take a moment, close our eyes:
And let us reacquaint ourselves with this gentle intensity.
Where we immortalize spaces,
Flirt with places,
Re-explore our faces.In case,
That the hidden violence of the mechanisms
Which erase,
Ever Catches up
To our machines
Of love and grace.Abdelrahman Hassan
The workshop
We started with an ice breaker that shaped our playground — it set the intention and the expectations of what the participants wanted to create by the end of the day, and established an initial interaction between strangers.
Our exercise prompted small groups to create a simple “game” on top of an existing AR filter or lens. It unlocked this view that poetic play can exist using AR capabilities (face recognition, body recognition, etc) regardless of the details of each lens. We had tag games, memory games, and also rituals of sending gratitude and sorrow.
Through our open call for participants, we curated a great mix of people from different backgrounds and made sure we had at least one person with more knowledge about Lens Studio in each group.
We presented a few directions to make our proposed approach to AR creation more tangible. The poetic prompts from Yoko Ono (and the Fluxus movement), the spaces for vulnerable conversations by Candy Chang, or the simple yet intimate documentation tasks proposed by Miranda July in her work Learning to love you more.
A poetic AR experience can be infused by these propositions, prompts, and recipes asking people to embody a feeling, an idea, a thought.
We also presented examples of street art, the more direct source of inspiration for artistic AR, a mindset that can see the digital layer as an urban intervention. But we also looked at the interfaces in the city — street signs, tags, chalk on the ground creating special spots or temporary spaces for play.
Our tool of choice: Lens Studio by Snap
The most accessible (and shareable) entry point to AR is through the tools developed by the major social media platforms (Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok). We are aware of (some) problematic aspects in each of them, but it was essential for us to inhabit and share our content in these places where culture is happening.
Our decision to use Snap is more connected to the vision they share, presenting an ecosystem that goes beyond the social platform itself, and its future as a ‘camera company.’ The tool has advanced capabilities and a growing creative community. How AR content can be experienced and shared even beyond social media platforms?
We divided groups and created a conceptual structure to speed up poetic prototyping. Worksheets provided the groups with prompts to merge their interests and elements in their practices, find unusual connections and tensions, and explore the themes that emerge from them.
We also offered a pathway for the experimentation, we created three templates within Lens Studio showcasing the technical capabilities that were more suited for the project, steering the participants away from the typical aesthetics that dominate AR on social media.
The Body is Here —New definitions for our bodies with 2D artifacts attached to faces and joints.
Movable Objects — Intervening in our world with 3D objects and typography.
Markers — Unlocking content from books, logos, and illustrations.
The workshop had 24 participants and it was very insightful. By the end, we were able to see prototypes ranging from a colorful shout against gender normativity to an invitation for embodying inner nonsense.
Besides the workshop, you can find more info about the other aspects of Poetic AR on our website.
Creative Director: Vitor Freire | Design Director: Monique Grimord | Curator & Poetic technologist: Abdelrahman Hassan | Play Designer: Nike Kuschick
This project was made possible with an experimentation grant offered by the Creative Industries Fund NL.
Special thanks to the students at iArts Maastricht for co-creating a learning environment that has inspired this project, and especially this workshop. Milena Dahl, Dārta Sakārne, Lot Stalman, Sam Coenen, Brian Waltmans, and Samsara Wiropranoto.
