John Craig Freeman with Greg Ulmer
In association with Manifest.AR Corcoran Gallery of Art
August 14 – September 1, 2013
Built for smart phone mobile devices and network enabled tablets, School Shooting eMorial creates a lasting monument to victims of school shootings. Simply download and launch a mobile augmented reality browser and aim the devices’ camera at the open space, just west of the U.S. Capital Building on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The browser uses geolocation software to superimpose 3D virtual objects at precise GPS coordinates, integrating the memorial into the physical location as if it existed in the real world.
This exhibition focuses on 6 projects from the larger Manifest.AR collective. Gallery 31 is the hub for the exhibition, but the show itself moves beyond the physical constraints of the gallery, into the monumental space of Washington DC, and in some cases beyond the authorial intentions of the artists – as the audience is encouraged to participate.
We hope this exhibition – with all of its idiosyncratic pitfalls and egalitarian possibilities – represents a progressive alternative to the status quo.
Read more including instructions to view the work on location on the National Mall in Washington D.C. just west of the U.S. Capital Building. Here is a link to the Installation photo stream and one for the Opening Reception.
Press:Reality Bytes, Lea Winerman, Read Washington Post Express.
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.”
John Craig Freeman 
