Not About Money—Digital Art after“Blockchain”

The ability to dream is not uniquely human, but the ability to record it, to rewrite it, to give it the power to carry a civilisation is uniquely human. From the invention of tools to the external “organs” that we can no longer get rid of, media technology has contributed to changing perceptions and ideas. The virtual has stirred up the real and the real has become virtual. It is not surprising that the earliest context in which “virtual reality” was used was in the description of the theatre by Aalto, the originator of the theatre of cruelty.

Later, computer systems and cathode ray tube (CRT) technology gave us a new scale of vision, and even though the experience was initially as crude as today’s meta-universe, it led to an influx of sci-fi writers and theorists, and in 1962, cinematographer Morton Heilig invented one of the earliest virtual reality machines, “Sensorama,” a prototype for VR equipment, in order to provide an immersive experience for the moviegoer. “Sensorama”, a prototype for VR equipment. Then Ivan Sutherland, known as the “father of computer graphics”, created the first virtual reality head-mounted display system, Dharma, with his student Bob Sproull in 1968. Sword of Damocles, the first virtual reality head-mounted display system, was created by Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull in 1968, which is considered to be the beginning of human experimentation with wearable hardware peripherals. Today’s concepts of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) were only introduced and differentiated after the 1990s to describe the different dimensions of the fusion of real and virtual environments.

The space for augmented reality applications was soon opened up with the introduction of ARToolKit, which was originally developed by Hirokazu Kato of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 1999 to solve two key problems in augmented reality: viewpoint tracking and virtual object interaction. It can do 2D object recognition and allow virtual objects to follow the actions of physical objects. It was open-sourced, incubated a large community of developers, and continues to this day. At the same time, its possibilities were first incorporated by game makers, film and TV companies into their business landscape. The fusion of technology and business also led Japanese director Keiichi Matsuda to envision a visual evolution of the future lifestyle, “Hyper-Reality”.

The popularity of technology has led to its transformation in the creative field, with AR augmented reality as a new form of intervention in the arts, and Manifest.AR was one of the first groups of artists to work with AR technology, exploring the uniqueness of the medium through “critical interventions in space”. From “We AR in MoMA” in 2010 to the AR pavilion based on the Giardini Gardens at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Virtual digital objects are liberated from the stagnant screen and are connected in this living reality. Digital nomadism between different GPS coordinates is realised while gaining spatial and state freedom.2021 The AR Biennale initiated by NRW-Forum Düsseldorf takes place in a park in Düsseldorf, Germany, as a visual social game of digital sculptures. The viewer experiences ghostly imagery and radical events that continue to take place on the open lawn simply through the app programme.

The origin of virtual reality can be traced back to the cave theory proposed by Plato in the West. Back to the local context, the translation of the related technology was also brought to China in the 1990s by Qian Xuesen with the term “spiritual realm”. Although the book “Theory, Realization and Application of Spiritual Realm (Virtual Reality) Technology” published in 1996 has already included the three characteristics of virtual reality system ‘I’ immersion-interaction-imagination, the device side from the ground up, the device side from the ground up, the device side from the ground up, the device side from the ground up, and the device side from the ground up. I” immersion-interaction-imagination), from headband display to brain-computer interface on the equipment side, and from MR package to rendering engine on the development side, but it seems that the technology has really arrived at the moment of dissemination and application a few decades late.

Therefore, in order to promote the synchronisation of production technology and artistic experimentation, we have taken “Augmented Reality – ToF AR” as the first phase of Capacitor’s project, which is also an experiment to build a bridge between Raiden Institute’s art and technology collaboration. We hope to bring together developers and artists with geeky development backgrounds in a local art context, and create a platform for them to communicate and learn from each other. At the same time, this gathering was successfully launched when Sony Semiconductor Technology announced its open source ToF AR SDK.