Augmented reality public art by John Craig Freeman
Zürich meets New York Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal, New York, NY May 17th – 22nd, 2014
With: Arthur Clay, DAW International, Marc Pollefeys, ETH Zurich, Caroline Bernard, Lalie Pascual, HR Giger, Lorenz Meier, Curious Minds, and Charles McCarry
Metro-NeXt took the public on a virtual journey from New York City’s Grand Central Station to the heart of Zurich, using the latest in augmented reality technology. The project exhibited a replica of a vintage New York City subway entrance that transported visitors to downtown Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city. It uses augmented reality and photogrammetry technologies to display 3D models of Zurich’s old town and the historic “Augustinergasse.”
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.”
