REFF AR Drug – Altered or Augmented Reality?

When we turn to think critically about the meaning of Augmented Reality, we cannot avoid considering its multiple faceted nature. Is it a technology meant to improve human skills and cognition by means of completely new generation of interactive tools? Or rather is it a technology that is ideally suited to manipulate reality and disable cognitive processes?  In some way this is what the REFF  Project, created by Fakepress, tries to question in the context of a ubiquitous media art exhibition.

FakePress is an international “think-tank”  that investigates, develops and creates new publishing models and editorial projects presented by new scenarios in technology, productivity and contemporary culture. Their basic tenet is that  freely disseminated knowledge, multi-author, ethnographic approaches, the availability of ubiquitous technologies and the possibility to add layers of information to ordinary reality and create new forms of experience and relationships with places, are elements that will help reshaping  reality in a continually open process of reinvention.

Inspired to the Magic Book (see examples here and here), Fakepress published a book titled REFF in november 2010. REFF (RomaEuropa FakeFactory)  is cross-medial in Augmented Reality, a mobile application and a new opensource platform  for cross-medial publishing. The paper version of the book is distributed in Italy by DeriveApprodi from November 2010, with the title “REFF. La reinvenzione del reale attraverso pratiche critiche di remix, mash up, ricontestualizzazione, reenactment”. The book is available here:

www.romaeuropa.org

With the foreword by Bruce Sterling, the book features over 30 contributions ranging from critical articles to interviews; a catalog of 30 works exploring the themes of remix in an extended way; a new experience of reading integrating the digital and paper dimensions through the use of Augmented Reality and tagging; an open source tool for creating ubiquitous, cross-media publications.

Following the publication of REFF book, Fakepress also launched the “REFF AR Drug” project in January 2011 in Rome, during an action of shopdropping with the famous artist Patrick Lichty. It was also launched in London as a part of the exhibit “REFF. Remix the world! Reinvent Reality” (25th February – 26th March 2011, Furtherfueld Gallery). Take a look at the video below to understand how the REFF AR Drug can heal the diseases of our time.

For more information click here.

[We thank Oriana Persico from Fakepress for submitting this information]

This post is also available in: Italian

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