Azadi SquARed is an augmented memorial to Neda Agha-Soltan, who was gunned down in the streets of Tehran during the 2009 Iranian election protests.
Built for smart phone mobile devices, this project allows visitors to Azadi Square to see the augmented reality memorial flag flapping in the wind above the Azadi Square monument. The public can simply download and launch the project and aim their device’s cameras at the monument. The application uses geolocation software to superimpose the memorial at the precise GPS coordinates atop the monument.
Neda’s death was captured on video by bystanders and broadcast to millions over the Internet. Her image remains a symbol of resistance.
Documentation Needed!
You can help document Azadi SquARed on location at Azadi Square in Tehran.
John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. His work seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place.
Freeman is a founding member of the international artists collective Manifest.AR and he has produced work and exhibited around the world including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, FACT Liverpool, Kunsthallen Nikolaj Copenhagen, Triennale di Milano, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing, He has had work commissioned by the ZERO1, Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, El Pais, Liberation, Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper's and Der Spiegel. Christiane Paul cites Freeman's work in her book Digital Art, as does Lucy Lippard in the Lure of the Local, and Margot Lovejoy in Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age.
His writing has been published in Rhizomes, Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure.
Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently a Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston.
Freeman writes, “If Andy Warhol set out to create a distinctly American art form in the twentieth century, I identify with those who seek to create a distinctly global art form in the twenty-first.”
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You obviously know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your
weblog when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?
John Craig Freeman 
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You obviously know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your
weblog when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?