The Auto Show, 2019 Public Art season on The Greenway

Augmented Reality Art on the Greenway
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Boston MA
Starting Wednesday, May 15th, 2019
With generous support from Hoverlay

In partnership with Boston Cyberarts, the Greenway Conservancy commissioned AR artists and a local historian to conceptually explore the themes of transportation and the automobile superimposed with views of The Greenway, combining the past, the present, and the future.

The featured AR artists on this project are Nancy Baker Cahill, Will Pappenheimer, and John Craig Freeman.

John Craig Freeman has contributed two augmented reality public art experiences for The Auto Show, including Fossil Fueled, a whimsical representation of the history of fossil fuel consumption, and Roadside Detritus, a poetic contemplation of U.S. Route 1, which was once routed along the same path through Boston that makes up the Rose Kennedy Greenway today.

Fossil Fueled, John Craig Freeman, augmented reality public art, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Boston MA, 2019.

These two projects allow users to view and explore world-scale virtual representations of the detritus of an era of optimism based on the freedoms afforded by the automobile and the interstate highway system. Fossil Fueled includes a collection of virtual gas pumps, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. Some have become unmoored, spinning in midair.

Roadside Detritus, John Craig Freeman, augmented reality public art, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Boston MA, 2019.

Old Route 1 was produced along the remaining U.S. Route 1 through Massachusetts from Attleboro to Newburyport. The artist traveled the historic highway scanning residual evidence of the utopic mid-twentieth century automobile culture.

Press

Julianna Thibodeaux, “Art in the Open, How Boston’s Public Art Boom is Helping to Reframe the Cultural Conversation,” Art New England, Vol. 40, Issue 5, September/October, 2019, pp. 38 – 41.
Jacquinn Sinclair, “An Augmented Reality Experience On The Greenway Reminds Us Of Life Before The Big Dig,” WBUR The ARTery, July 12, 2019.
Calvin Hennick, “Augmented Reality Brings Art and History to Life for Nonprofits,”
BizTech, July 12, 2019.

About John Craig Freeman

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.”

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