Exhibition: Friday November 8th – Sunday December 15th
Opening Reception: Friday November 8th 6-8pm
The Illusion Layer is an exhibition that highlights artists using Artivive to bring their 2D artworks to life. Artivive is a relatively new augmented reality app, out of Austria, which is designed for traditional 2D artists and animators to augment animations or videos on top of their paintings, prints, and murals without learning complicated code or a new programming language. Artivive is intuitive to use. For both the artist and the viewer, you don’t have to know much about the tech in order to get straight to the content. The interface is simple and basically non-technical, however the results can be surprising and sophisticated.
The exhibition will include original prints and drawings, both 2D and sculptural as well as images of some of the murals in the greater Boston area that incorporate the app. There will even be an augmented couch.
The artists include a number of MIT students who worked on The Borderline founded by Julia Rue, which is a 200ft long collaborative mural on the MIT campus. It is the first student-driven mural on campus with augmented reality. Sneha Shrestha is a Nepali artist who paints mindful mantras in her native language and meshes the aesthetics of Sanskrit scriptures with graffiti influences. She has used ARTIVIVE on a number of her murals. Four prints from The Pursuit of Happiness, an augmented reality letterpress poster exhibition about presidential campaigns by Martha Rettig and Sophie Hodara. A number of Animated Protest Posters, from a class at the Massachusetts College of Art on Artivive and letter press. Etching by Abe Everson-Tena. An AR Sofa by Growth Spurt, with electronics. Growth Spurt is a collective of New England artists producing collaborative projects using sculpture, video, painting, and new media. Breathe Life 3, by Rob “Problak” Gibbs, a new mural at 808 Tremont Street. The AR has both figures signing “breathe”and “life” in ASL. And an oil painting, Putti, by Russell Pensyl.