Lightening Talk
Aysegul Koc
PhD (ABD)
Joint Program in Communication and Culture York and Ryerson Universities
Biography
Aysegul Koc is currently completing a PhD in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities, Canada. Her two-part dissertation involves an immersive augmented reality installation and a critical written text on technology and displacement.
Abstract
This lightening talk is based on my own research in augmented reality, installation art and the phenomenon of tempo-spatial displacement with regards to contemporary technologies. It is both a critique of and hopefully a debate around displacement, both as a socio-cultural phenomenon and a technology-driven status quo in which multimedia and digital overlaying of information and interconnectedness make us ‘present’ in time and places we actually are not. Technological displacement may be viewed as an extension of physical displacement of individuals and communities in that the need to reconcile, re-invent and in capitalistic sense innovatively market distances/proximity becomes more and more an underlying theme of contemporary lives. Nowhere are the reorientations of presence more accentuated than in ‘augmented space’, in Manovich’s terms “a physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user.” In a certain way, this describes the quotidian of many and it may be argued that our sense of reality is already ‘augmented’ by digital stimuli. Here I make the case that in an augmented environment we are not simply displaced but multiplaced. Augmentation is superimposing multimedia to real space, blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual, creating a heterogeneous space defined neither by the standards of the virtual nor the real but the coexistence and cooperation of both.