Guerrilla Art - Smith

The Guerrilla Art book that we read was actually very helpful. As I was going through it I was thinking about how I could use some of the techniques and make it augmented. There was one idea about leaving little inspirational cut outs for people in random places, which got me thinking about augmented things to have little messages. This lead me to thinking about how I've seen messages written on bathroom mirror saying, "You're beautiful" which got me thinking about maybe augmenting things for adolescent girls. Or even boys. To try and help with self-esteem issues. Or maybe augmenting things for High School students.
I'm going to be a teacher and so I'm taking an EDF class about adolescent growth and development and self-esteem is a big thing for adolescence and if we can encourage girls to stop being so cruel to each other and to look out for one another that might change how girls grow up. We could also try to augment things boys see too so that they stop using the term "you blank like a girl" or using "girl" as a punch line.

Reading the guerrilla art book and Smith’s comments about legality made me wonder about the legal issues we might run into. I know we talked a little bit about companies putting their work out there and we aren’t changing anything, but are new laws and copyrights going to be written to try and stop people from augmenting things? Smith also talked about guerrilla art not being permanent, but does our ability to augment things change that and make it so that it will be permanent in a way? It seems that some of the fun of guerrilla art is the fact that it disappears or is taken by someone, but with augmented reality there’s not the same uniqueness or impermanence.

Also, these ideas were really cool and I think it’s awesome that people leave books in public places and grow plants in random places. I just hope that our society doesn’t become so technology based that we lose the interaction with people these types of arts describe. You might not get the same out of watching people look at your art, because you might not know if people can see your art or not. I also feel like the secrecy behind the whole adventure is kind of taken out because you have to tell people about it so they have the right app in order to see your augmented reality. I don’t want to slap augmented reality because I think it has been really fun, but I also think that for this guerrilla art it might be better to leave it to the other mediums and to not get augmented reality mixed up in it.