Wojciech Bruszewski's "Big Dick" and augmented reality storytelling

Jay David Bolter defines Augmented Reality (AR) as a ‘term for a constellation of digital technologies that enable users to display and interact with digital information integrated into their immediate physical environment’. The development of portable devices is causing a surge in the development of mass-market AR technology; it is used in geolocation applications and is widely used in sports to measure precise distances. Augmented Reality is also often used in preparing modern museum displays. In the field of contemporary literature, AR books have a short tradition, and this approach to modelling books that interact with virtual reality is used only sporadically. Considered among the most important works written in this convention is Between Page and Screen, by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, a collection of poetry that is a conversation between two characters, P and S, which takes place through a traditional book printed with QR codes. When scanned by a computer camera, they call up a text. Most of the other AR books on the market are in the vein of illustrated (and digitally remediated) pop-up books, mainly for children. The publishers themselves call them ‘virtual interactive pop-up books’ or ‘virtual 3D pop-up books’. The body of the paper is an analysis of how AR poetics are used to create a story that mixes media and is based on media. The aim of this paper is to present the storytelling capabilities of AR books, which are equally based on print and digital media, suspended between the physical book and the electronic library, as visual artist, filmmaker, and writer Wojciech Bruszewski conceived and executed in his Polish-language novel Big Dick. The author uses a ‘half-print, half-Internet’ construct to mix digital and print storytelling in this novel of the 20th century. The work’s protagonist, the stateless Richard von Hakenkreutz, is an amalgam of historical facts, sliding through history like an éminence grise, a supporting character, through the offices of the most important leaders and businessmen, participating in major historical events