Street ARt: Using Augmented Reality to Create Digital Street Art

The long-imagined fiction of a digitally supplemented world is fast becoming a reality. Augmented Reality technology is advancing at a rapid rate, approaching mass adoption and use. Available to anyone with a modern mobile phone, Augmented Reality allows for a number of possibilities, augmenting the physical world with information or content of varying types. These possibilities have a number of implications for both utility and creative expression. This thesis explores the use of Augmented Reality as a tool for creative expression, comparing its use of the physical world to Street Art’s use of the street. Street Art uses the street as an artistic resource (Riggle, 2010) to provoke and elicit response. Augmented Reality uses physical location and context to strengthen its content and deliver information or entertainment. Augmented Reality Artworks have contested physical space (Skwarek, 2014; Veenhof & Skwarek, 2010) and shifted the boundaries of curation (Garbe, 2014). This thesis compares the histories of Augmented Reality and Street Art, resulting in a proposal for using Augmented Reality as a method for Street Art, allowing artists to create Digital Street Art. Research through Design explores this practice, creating Digital Street Art works that use the possibilities of Augmented Reality technology to use the street as an artistic resource. Using digital techniques like animation, interactivity, data visualisation and three-dimensional imagery; this thesis aims to explore how the Digital Street Artist can create work that engages with the public space and provoke a response. This is explored through several Digital Street Art responses to the public space and issues that can be addressed within it. These responses are designed to use digital techniques and AR technology to make artistic use of the street. Allowing it to be both Digital in nature and Street Art in essence