A virtual public artwork by John Craig Freeman San José, CA, April 7th–8th, 2017
Produced for exhibition on behalf of ZERO1, in the Paseo de San Antonio Plaza in front of the Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San José, CA during the Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge, Paseo Portal, Securing the Virtual Border acts as an access point where the public can immerse themselves in virtual reality experiences documenting gentrification, the housing shortage, and working class flight in the Bay Area generally, and homelessness, displacement and migration globally.
Instructions: To view the augmented reality work on location in the Paseo de San Antonio Plaza in front of the Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San José, CA, with any late model iPhone, iPad or Android, Install the free Layar augmented reality browser app, http://layar.com and search Geo Layers for ‘Paseo Portal’ or scan this code.
The dispossessed are all around us. Now, with the use of Silicon Valley’s most cutting edge virtual and augmented technology, anyone can see this new reality.
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 
