John Craig Freeman | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | University of California, San Diego, University of Colorado Boulder |
Known for | Public art, new media, virtual reality and augmented reality |
Awards | NEA, Individual Artists Fellowship |
Patron(s) | FACT, LACMA, Rhizome, Turbulence |
Website | JohnCraigFreeman.net |
John Craig Freeman (born February 16, 1959) is a contemporary artist and a Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston.
Freeman received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, in 1986. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1990.
Freeman is a public artist 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. [1] Freeman's public art has evolved from the use of billboards in the early 1990s to mixed reality installations at the turn of the century, with current work focusing on augmented reality. In a 2012 interview, Freeman stated, "My work seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place." [2]
The following are some examples of his work.
Freeman's earliest work, titled Operation Greenrun II and developed as his master's thesis at the University of Colorado, used billboards to draw attention to a contaminated nuclear production facility at Rocky Flats, Colorado. In this work, eleven billboard faces were created with a message protesting the Rocky Flats site. [3] The ensuing controversy resulted in the decision to shut down Rocky Flats for good. Writing of this project in her book titled Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age, Margot Lovejoy says of Freeman that he "believes that a public art can circumvent problems of the gallery system such as the commodification of culture and the perpetuation of an exclusive, elite system for art. He believes in bringing art to the public." She goes on to quote Freeman, who said that "If people are too busy to go to the gallery or museum, it makes sense to bring art to them. They don't even have to get out of their cars." [4]
The "interventionist, political nature" of Operation Greenrun II [5] established a pattern that has remained consistent throughout Freeman's career. This pattern can be seen in the work he titles Imaging Place, an ongoing work which employs panoramic photography in location-based projects that highlight sites affected by globalization. Locations where this work has been done include Beijing; Taipei, Taiwan; São Paulo, Brazil; the U.S./Mexico border; the Miami River; Lowell, Massachusetts; Kaliningrad, Russia; Warsaw, Poland; and Belfast, among others. His process has been called a "nonlinear documentary method." [6]
Freeman worked on the Imaging Place: Miami River project as part of an interdisciplinary, collaborative group called the Florida Research Ensemble. [7]
Much of Freeman’s work since 2010 uses emergent forms of augmented reality as interventionist public art. He is a founding member of the international artists collective Manifest.AR. [8]
Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos is an augmented reality public art project and memorial, dedicated to the thousands of migrant workers who have died along the U.S./Mexico border in recent years trying to cross the desert southwest in search of work and a better life. Built for smartphone mobile devices, this project allows people to visualize the scope of the loss of life by marking each location where human remains have been recovered with a virtual object or augmentation. The public can simply download and launch a mobile application and aim their devices’ cameras at the landscape along the border and the surrounding desert. The application uses geolocation software to superimpose individual augments at the precise GPS coordinates of each recorded death, enabling the public to see the objects integrated into the physical location as if they existed in the real world. [9]
Orators, Rostrums, and Propaganda Stands is based on the work of Gustav Klutsis, including his designs for Screen-radio Orators, Rostrums, and Propaganda Stands from 1922. Each of four virtual orators displays a black and white animation from a contemporary mass uprising: Tank Man near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989; the assassination of Neda Agha-Soltan, who was gunned down in the streets of Tehran during the 2009 Iranian election protests; scenes from Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 2011 Arab Spring; and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street uprising. Each of these images is juxtaposed, in montage, with frames from the Odessa Steps scene of Sergei Eisenstein‘s historic Battleship Potemkin film. When touched, the virtual objects play sound from the uprising. The stands call up both the resurgence and nostalgia of current worldwide political idealism as they re-imagine the museum plaza in the function of the public square.
Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Artists Respond program, Orators, Rostrums, and Propaganda Stands has also been exhibited at Kunsthallen Nikolaj, as part of the Conversations exhibition during the 2012 Copenhagen Art Festival and at Triennale di Milano in Milan, Italy, as part of the No Need for Real exhibition in 2012.
Water wARs was an augmented reality pavilion for undocumented artists/squatters and water war refugees, which anticipates the flood of environmental refugees into the developed world caused by environmental degradation, global warming and the privatization of the world’s drinking water supply by multinational corporations. Water wARs was exhibited as part of the Manifest.AR's unofficial Venice Biennial Intervention in front of the main pavilion in Giardini and in the Piazza San Marco during the 54th Venice Biennial International Art Exhibition, ILLUMInations. [10]
The project exhibits a replica of a vintage New York City subway entrance that transports visitors to downtown Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city. It uses augmented reality and photogrammetry technologies to display 3D models of Zurich’s old town and the historic ″Augustinergasse.″ MetroNeX+ is presented by ETH Zurichhttps, Digital Art Week International, and Virtuale Switzerland.
Freeman began his academic career in the early 1990s in San Diego, where he lectured at the University Of California, San Diego, for three and a half years. He was an assistant professor at the University of Florida from 1994 to 1999, where he coordinated the photography area. From 1999 to 2002 he ran the digital media art curriculum as an associate professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is currently an associate professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. In 2012 he received a visiting scholar appointment at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, University of California, San Diego. In 2006 he taught as a visiting professor at Shih Hsin University, in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2011 Freeman joined the editorial board of the Public Art Dialogue. [12]
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated 3D content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects. The overlaid sensory information can be constructive, or destructive. As such, it is one of the key technologies in the reality-virtuality continuum.
Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process. It can also refer to computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various names have been used to describe digital art, including computer art, electronic art, multimedia art, and new media art.
Mixed reality (MR) is a term used to describe the merging of a real-world environment and a computer-generated one. Physical and virtual objects may co-exist in mixed reality environments and interact in real time.
The OpenIllusionist Project is a computer program for the rapid development of augmented reality applications. OpenIllusionist provides software libraries to make easier the tasks of generating these images, performing the necessary computer vision tasks to interpret the user input, modelling the behaviour of any of the virtual objects, and threading all of the above to provide the illusion of reality.
Locative media or location-based media (LBM) is a virtual medium of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media, however, is not bound to the same location to which the content refers.
Craig Saper is a Professor of Language, Literacy, & Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
In virtual reality (VR), immersion is the perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. The perception is created by surrounding the user of the VR system in images, sound or other stimuli that provide an engrossing total environment.
A projection augmented model is an element sometimes employed in virtual reality systems. It consists of a physical three-dimensional model onto which a computer image is projected to create a realistic looking object. Importantly, the physical model is the same geometric shape as the object that the PA model depicts.
Gregory Peter Panos is an American writer, futurist, educator, strategic planning consultant, conference / event producer, and technology evangelist in augmented reality, virtual reality, human simulation, motion capture, performance animation, 3D character animation, human-computer interaction, and user experience design.
Lawrence Jay Rosenblum is an American mathematician, and Program Director for Graphics and Visualization at the National Science Foundation.
Craig Barron is an American visual effects artist and creative director at Magnopus, a media company that produces visual development and virtual production services for motion pictures, television, museums and multimedia platforms.
Metaio GmbH was a privately held augmented reality (AR) company that was acquired by Apple Inc. in May 2015. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, with subsidiaries in San Francisco, California, New York City, New York, and Dallas, Texas, Metaio provided a software development kit (SDK) for programming PC, web, mobile applications, and custom offline augmented reality applications. Additionally, Metaio was the creator of Junaio, a free mobile AR browser available for Android and iOS devices.
WebAR, previously known as the Augmented Web, is a web technology that allows for augmented reality functionality within a web browser. It is a combination of HTML, Web Audio, WebGL, and WebRTC. From 2020s more known as web-based Augmented Reality or WebAR, which is about the use of augmented reality elements in browsers.
Tamiko Thiel is an American artist, known for her digital art. Her work often explores "the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity," and uses augmented reality (AR) as her platform. Thiel is based in Munich, Germany.
Smartglasses or smart glasses are eye or head-worn wearable computers. Many smartglasses include displays that add information alongside or to what the wearer sees. Alternatively, smartglasses are sometimes defined as glasses that are able to change their optical properties, such as smart sunglasses that are programmed to change tint by electronic means. Alternatively, smartglasses are sometimes defined as glasses that include headphone functionality.
A transreality game, sometimes written as trans-reality game, describes a type of video game or a mode of gameplay that combines playing a game in a virtual environment with game-related, physical experiences in the real world and vice versa. In this approach a player evolves and moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual stages, brought together in one unified game space. Alongside the rising trend of gamification, the application of game mechanics to tasks that are not traditionally associated with play, a transreality approach to gaming incorporates mechanics that extend over time and space, effectively playing through a players day-to-day interactions.
Patrick Lichty is a conceptual media artist, activist, curator, and educator. Lichty is currently a Creative Digital Media professor at Winona State University.
Commercial augmented reality (CAR) describes augmented reality (AR) applications that support various B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) commercial activities, particularly for the retail industry. The use of CAR started in 2010 with virtual dressing rooms for E-commerce.
Nancy Baker Cahill is an American new media artist based in Los Angeles, California. She has created immersive augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences, video installations and blockchain projects, oftentimes rooted in drawing. Her work frequently merges technology and public art, drawing upon both feminist land art and the history of political interventions to examine systemic power, body autonomy, civics and climate crisis, among other issues.
Caitlin Fisher is a Canadian media artist, poet, writer, futurist and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she also directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab. Fisher is also a Co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, and an international award-winning digital storyteller. Creator of some of the world’s first AR poetry and long-from VR narratives. Pioneer of research-creation who defended Canada's first born-digital dissertation. Member of the early AR artist collective Manifest AR. Fisher is also known for the 2001 hypermedia novel These Waves of Girls, and for her work creating content and software for augmented reality. "Her work is poetic and exploratory, currently combining the development of authoring software with evocative literary constructs."