Augmented Reality as Public Art

Nancy Baker Cahill, CORPUS, 2022/2024

The Hammer's architectural transformation added a sculpture terrace on Wilshire. Not a sculpture "garden," it's a pedestal intended to show one very large sculpture for extended periods. The first installed work, on view for over a year, was Sanford Bigger's Oracle, a 25-ft. bronze figure merging the Greek and Luba canons. It's now been replaced with an augmented reality animation, CORPUS, by media artist Nancy Baker Cahill. CORPUS is an compelling piece that shows why so many artists are engaging with AR as a medium. It also exemplifies the limitations of current technology (read: "phones") in presenting AR as public art.

Sanford Biggers, Oracle, 2021, as installed at the Hammer in 2023

CORPUS, without AR goggles

Start with the obvious. To passers by Cahill's virtual sculpture is… an empty pedestal. In order to experience CORPUS, you have to download Cahill's 4th Wall app. Then you have to point your phone's camera at a picture on a label on the sculpture terrace. Pan up, and then you can see Cahill's virtual sculpture on your phone's screen. Nothing in this process is difficult, but it is a process. If the average museum visitor spends 15 seconds on an artwork… well, the set-up is going to take more than that. 

AR is best experienced with googles, and googles are expensive. A few years back artists and museums jumped on board the notion that AR can be experienced on phones. But at best phone screens are a tiny window through which a large virtual sculpture may be visible. Details are hard to see at arm's length, and the screen may be washed out by daylight. I was better able to appreciate Cahill's figure at home, looking at screen shots and videos on a large screen. But that undercuts the site specificity.

Pro tip: Bring head phones. Otherwise the piece's sound track is hard to hear against traffic. 

CORPUS was commissioned by the Berggruen Institute, the L.A.-based philosophy think tank, for a 2022 symposium on "What Will Life Become?" CORPUS is a millefleur cyborg, an Archimboldesque heroic nude, composed of elements representing blossoms, lichens, micro plastics, and machine parts. Like our embattled planet, it's in a constant state of disintegration and renewal.

The problem with CORPUS, and today's phone-based AR in general, is that it defeats one important purpose of public art, to spark the curiosity of the not-necessarily-into-art crowd. Passers-by wondered what Biggers' Oracle was. Some ended up visiting the museum or at least Googling the image and learning a little about Biggers and Greek temple sculptures and African masks. In a way, all public art is augmented reality now.