Generative augmented reality installation by Tamiko Thiel and /p, 2024

Commissioned by BROICH Digital Art Museum via DAM Projects Berlin

Opening 09 February: in "À la Recherche de Vera Molnar,"
Ludwig Museum Budapest, 10 February - 14 April, 2024.

To view Vera Plastica on your own smartphones, you must be at the Ludwig Museum Budapest:
- Click on the link below to download our free ARpoise app
- Allow access to camera and location!
- Then scan the Vera Plastica QR code at the exhibit with the ARpoise app.

"Vera Plastica" is a generative augmented reality (AR) installation inspired by Vera Molnar's generative grid compositions, in which she uses algorithms to determine random variations in the geometry and color of a thematic form, which progress in rows and columns to fill the image space. As artists whose works are primarily spatial and time-based, however, we have extended her process into the 3rd and 4th dimensions of space and time.

"Vera Plastica" is thus a dialogue between a 2D, top down orthographic view of the artwork, shown on a horizontal monitor lying face upwards, and a 3D spatial, perspective view of the entire AR installation, visible in a very large wall monitor and in visitors' own smartphones. True to our own thematic concerns, our basic unit is not a square or circle or letter, as is typical for Vera Molnar's work, but a (virtual) plastic bottle, symbol of the underwater plastic pollution that is creating a Plastocene environment for all life underwater.

The installation is also a commentary on how our viewpoint can shape our perceptions. This play between 2D and higher dimensions is inspired by Edwinn Abbott Abbott's 1884 novella "Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions," in which Abbott describes the impossibility for a 2 dimensional creature to perceive a form in 3 dimensions. In our 3D perspective AR view of the exhibition space, the visitor realizes that the colorful circle patterns they see on the monitor are simply a top down view of the „sprouts“ of a huge „plastokelp forest“ that expand out from the black box of the horizontal monitor to engulf all visitors in the galley space.