Paintwork

I loved this short story about the augmented street artist 3Cube. There are several things I want to touch on in this story and one of them is about accessing the augmented reality world. In the story you have to "double-blink acceptance" (7) in order to engage in the augment. I like the concept of having to accept an augment in order to see it. That is along the same lines of us having to hold our devices up to something augmented in order to see the augment. I like giving people the option to see or not see what you have augmented. For one it produces this curiosity about what the augment is, but it also gives the view choice in what they want to see, which is something we don't really have with advertisements today. We are just bombarded with whatever content advertising agencies want us to see. Also, it seems like the spex, the glasses people wear, have the ability to show the viewer their "own content." I think that is also a cool idea and I know it's something google glasses were trying to do and companies are still working on. I just don't want AR turning into the gate way for companies to bombard us with more advertisements. I want AR to be used in productive ways.

Another aspect I loved about this story stories was the whole 2D vs. 3D battle that was going on. This is a time when there is all this technology and artists are reverting back to 2D mediums. The character Art had it right that AR, in this time, has turned into digital noise. He compares it to TV and Twitter, which I found very interesting because it seems as if TV has become background noise to a lot of us. We have the TV on just so there isn't silence, but no one seems to ever be watching TV anymore. Art calls it, "disposable, infinitely fucking copyable digital noise. Mass-produced and instantly forgotten" (25). I absolutely loved that part, because 3Cube then lunges at Artefackt, who is a hologram, and knocks his spex off his face and the rave and Art vanishes, completely forgotten. I think that is so true of the digital world. It is so much easier to go in and rewrite code, if you know how, then to go erase something painted, because even if you paint over something you can always uncover the painted over thing. There's a type of permanence with 2D that is lost with 3D. As we see when 3Cube's QR codes are painted over and destroyed making his art not show and the 2D one the only thing that can be seen.

The last thing I wanted to touch on was this idea of having the technology, but not necessarily having the money and how that fits into art. Tera broke his spinal cord and there is the technology to fix it and give him his legs back, but he doesn't have the money to do this operation. Art starts out as a street artist, but gets big and then starts designing billboards for money and the whole community thinks he's a sell out. It seems as if even in the art world as in mainstream money seems to be a force that rules. Capitalism doesn't seem to fade in the future. Tera even reverts to 2D in order to get his legs back as well as get people to stop looking at their spexes and to look at the billboards. There is a reverse in technology. Once we have progressed so far we want to regress and go back to the way things use to be. I think this story is very interesting in that respect, because you can see it with our phones - they started out big and it was all about getting them smaller and slicker, but then we wanted bigger screens so they made the phones bigger, but now they are trying to come out with watches as phones so we are regressing back to small again. Humans can't make up their mind about what they want when it comes to technology. This story shows that nicely. One thing is for certain though, it's all about the money.