Sander Veenhof (Netherlands, 1973) is one of the members of "Manifest.AR", an international collective of artists working in the augmented reality domain. Installing their work virtually, at a distance, and without the need for them to be physically present anywhere, their works defy borders, physical boundaries or any thinkable limitation of whatever kind. The MoMA museum New York uninvitedly hosts a Manifest.AR exhibition, there are virtual objects inside the Oval Office and Pentagon, and from August 5th on, the global augmented reality sky now has a screensaver. Manifest.AR is everywhere! Even when they're not. Sander Veenhof / SNDRV.NL |
INTRODUCING: the screensaver anno 20XX: in Augmented Reality ScreensavAR consists of the most iconic screensaver themes of the past, converted to the augmented reality of today. Look up to travel through an endless starfield, or gaze at the living line pattern finding itŐs way through the sky, or immerse yourself in a nostalgic world of Windows95 logoŐs flying around. In computer-land, things change, but still stay the same. The processing power of todayŐs devices is always exactly two times the speed of that of last yearŐs devices. Graphics are twice as realistic, each year, and devices become twice as small. We are carrying them in our pocket these days, to be used on the go. And as computers have always provided us with a window into a digital universe, nowadays, that universe is the semi-digital environment we inhabit, thanks to augmented reality. But when thereŐs nothing virtual to see there? A screensaver appears, as always. Only it has evolved from its original 640x480 pixel resolution into a bigger than life sized animation, appearing in the skies surrounding us. CREATED ON THE OCCASION OF NOT HAVING AN AR ARTWORK IN THE SKIES OVER: - (un)seen sculptures , march 9-31 Rozelle, Sydney Australia - The "Distributed Collectives" show in the Little Berlin gallery opening August 5th, Philedelpia USA REVIEW: Philadelphia Weekly "More radically site-specific than even a QR hobo marker, the collective Manifest.AR contributes the most exhilarating work in the show by deploying augmented reality (AR) technology to explore a new kind of space. Founded in 2011, the collective creates geo-specific art installations, backed by a stridently hopeful manifesto announcing that in AR, "The Safety Glass of the Display is shattered and the Physical and Virtual are united in a new In-Between Space." Dislocating the viewer from our "so-called Physical Real," this in-between space hurtles toward us when we stumble upon the colossal, hidden sculptures in "ScreensavAR" by Sander Veenhof. Visible only through a smart phone using the "filter" function in an app called "Layar," Veenhof's work forces the viewer to physically scan the gallery in order to discover the delicately helixed sculptures that float above our heads. Like peering through a magic spyglass into another dimension, Veenhof's work plunges us into a spatially dissonant reality. Suddenly -impossibly- we physically exist in the same space as a virtual phenomenon." |