Produced by Boston Cyberarts, curated by George Fifield Salem Maritime National Historic Site May 27–November 30
The Augmented Landscape, an NEA funded augmented reality exhibit to be held by Boston Cyberarts at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, including work by John Craig Freeman, Kristin Lucas, Will Pappenheimer and Tamiko Thiel, will open to the public on Saturday, May 27, and remain on view through November 30, 2017.
Virtual Russia and Virtual China, geo-located augmented reality public art by John Craig Freeman, uses the historic Salem Custom House as a metaphoric portal, transporting users to two alternative realities created by the artist on location in the cities of Wuhan in Central China and Saint Petersburg Russia last year. The project is meant to evoke the history and contemporary manifestations of globalization, international trade and revolution.
Publications
Ed. Desmond Hui, AR Awakening: X-Realities of Hong Kong Layering, pp54-67, Hang Sang University, Hong Kong, 2019.
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 
