It’s hard to escape the debate over the proposed border wall with Mexico, but, if you live in New England, difficult to envision the area where it would go. New media artist John Craig Freeman has brought the U.S.-Mexico border to Boston through a technique called augmented reality (AR), or digital information integrated into the world in real time. His project, Virtual U.S. Mexico Border, enables viewers to be in two different worlds simultaneously.

A friend and I downloaded the layar app onto our iPhones and looked for the virtual wall at the Boston Common under a blue October sky. As we approached the band shell, past the hot-dog cart and tennis courts with the Prudential Center partially visible, the words 12 points of interest found appeared on our screens. We wondered if people thought we were playing Pokeman Go, which uses the same technology.

“I’m in Mexico,” my friend called out. I was a few steps behind her but soon saw it emerge: a wall decorated with a colorful mural. We walked closer, it came into focus, and then we walked through it to the U.S. side, where a barbed wire fence came up from the beach. We had the disconcerting sensation of stone-faced border guards watching us. We saw the backs of people peering through the fence to the area where friends and family from both sides can meet briefly.

Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

“One of the things I try to do is humanize stories that have a political theme,“ says the professor of new media art at Emerson College in Boston. “Our politics now rely on the notion of the other. Making a border is a psychological thing.”

Commissioned by the 2017 Screen City Biennial in Stavanger Norway,  the border project was his way of documenting the North American migration crisis. Shortly after he was done in Norway, he set it up in Boston.

Along with his other AR projects, it is “geo-located,” meaning he has enabled it for specific locations. He takes hundreds of photos on location, then builds the scene by using software to extract a three-dimensional model. He can replicate it anywhere, and he has no set date for taking this one down.

At the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Freeman has another project, Virtual China and Virtual Russia, where, by being in two places at once, a viewer can experience their connectivity. In Virtual China, a mother and daughter sitting in a courtyard of a former palace can be seen during a virtual walk through the city of Wuhan in Central China. In Virtual Russia, an image of Saint Petersburg emerges piece by piece as viewers walk along designated points. Both are part of The Augmented Landscape, presented by Boston Cyberarts on view through November 30th.

“China and the Baltics were two parts of the world that were critical to Salem becoming an important port,” Freeman says. “We think of globalization and international trade as occurring now, but it has been occurring for hundreds of years.”

Seeing the pieces is not hard. Simply enable location on your smartphone or tablet. Download and launch layar app. Pull down upper left menu, tap Geo Layers, then Search Layers and search for Salem Art or US/Mexico Border.

Top image: Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

Studying painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a master’s at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Freeman soon realized that he was not cut out for conventional art that he would need to market. Instead, he wanted to make public art “to address the social and political issues of our time.”

Then the internet became a public square. “We saw the migration of the public square to everywhere but nowhere,” he says. “I followed it down the rabbit hole to mobile networks and turned to the quest to create new forms of art.”

A native of San Diego, Calif., Freeman lives in Windham, N.H. His work isn’t so much influenced by where he lives as by “how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place,” he says.

John Craig Freeman–new media artist
Windham, New Hampshire
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Top image: Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

The post Exploring an Augmented Reality appeared first on Take Magazine.

Maine performance artist Sara Juli makes a point of saying the word vagina at least once a day. “It’s a perfectly lovely word,” Juli says from her home in Portland, Maine, where she in moved in 2014 with her husband and two children after 15 years in Brooklyn.

“It’s not a curse word or an offensive word,” she says. “It’s a body part. How can you empower girls if they can’t say a part of their body? It should be celebrated, not shunned.”

Unfortunately for Juli as a new mother, that vagina gave her a lot of trouble, going into spasms that led to four years of urinary incontinence. Luckily for her as an artist, she found a way to use humor as the basis of a performance piece based on her actual diagnosis of tense vagina, the treatment for it, and the chaotic years of new motherhood.

Sara Juli performing Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis at Asheville Masonic Temple in 2016, photo by Kristofer Alan Thompson

The piece, “Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis,” premiered at the experimental SPACE Gallery in Portland in 2015 and has been touring ever since. “I was quietly suffering,” Juli says. “I assumed that peeing in your pants all the time was part of the experience of having a baby. Women say they suffer their whole life from this. What I love about using humor on a taboo topic is that it allows people to listen to you.”

Treatment for dysfunctional pelvic floor muscles at a pelvic floor rehabilitation center in Portland form the basis of Juli’s piece. At her first visit, she started choreographing her performance. She weaves in what she calls “the underbelly of motherhood, the loneliness in the early years of raising children.”

This hour-long solo uses humor, movement, sounds, songs, text and audience participation, Kegel exercises, and vibrators “in a non-sexualized way,” Juli says. “I think it’s empowering for women to think about their vaginas and what their vaginas need.” In program notes, she includes information about the location of local pelvic floor rehabilitation centers.

A native of Waterford, Connecticut, Juli trained in modern and improvisational dance, graduating from Skidmore College with a degree in dance and anthropology. To Juli, the two fields are related. “Dance is all about connecting with people,” she says, “and anthropology is about connecting with people in all cultures.”

Juli’s work has been performed in New York at such places as Performance Space 122, Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Joe’s Pub as part of the Dancenow/NYC Festival, as well as nationally and internationally. She will perform “Tense Vagina” at Ko Festival of Performance in mid-July in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Juli credits the move to Maine with invigorating her creation of new solo work. “In New York, thousands of voices are similar to yours,” she says. “My career has taken off since I moved to New England. My voice is stronger. The air quality alone makes you feel happy.”

When she is not working on new performance projects, Juli is building a fundraising consulting practice, Surala Consulting. In the practice, she advises national artists and non-profits on strategic fundraising solutions. “The arts are threatened in a major way,” she says, “and making sure that artists have a diverse fundraising profile is critical.”

Sara Juli–performance artist
Portland, Maine
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Top Image Sara Juli performing Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis at American Dance Festival 2016, photo by Grant Halverson

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