Technology is changing the way we make, experience and share our ideas. But how do artists use it to shape their craft and the way their audiences experience it? ART + TECHNOLOGY explores how creatives are bringing the disparate fields of ART + TECHNOLOGY together to reveal surprising works that belong to a whole new genre.
Viewing technology as a crucial part of the art world in 2018, John Craig Freeman works with AR to create authentic artwork that will be relevant to the masses. In the twenty-sixth episode of ART+TECHNOLOGY, we are introduced to John’s AR art through the lens of globalisation and local communities.
John’s project, Coming Home is an AR public art installation that raises awareness of the houseless in San Francisco. To showcase the plights of the elderly, the homeless and students; Coming Home combines AR and storytelling to create a vehicle for education and empathy through art.
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 
