A student AR exhibition at SJTU, June 2024

The AR exhibition, Tian Di Jiao Tong, was produced by the students of the Curatorial Practice I class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry. Project direction was provided by ICCI Visiting Artist, Terrence Bao, and instructor, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes. The AR platform was provided by EZXR, a Hanzhou-based leader in AR technology.

This video shows documentation of one of three student group projects on the site: 'University Symphony', by digital curators Cuiyi Lin, Chenyang Yang, and Sying Ma.

New technologies for displaying immersive images (2023- )

The VR Cycloramas Project at the Future Museum Studio seeks to develop new technologies for displaying immersive images inspired by the popular phenomenon of 19th century cycloramas.

Shown in this video, the Shanghai Bund VR Cyclorama displays historic panoramas of the Bund / on a wall-sized screen that can be controlled by body movements. Audiences can zoom, pan, and explore matched gigapixel scans of panoramic photographs from 1882, 1947, and 2022 at an immersive size. The Chicago Fire VR Cyclorama uses a gigapixel scan of an antique 1899 cyclorama painting of the great Chicago Fire. Presented through WebXR, the painting can be explored in 360 from anywhere. Narrated tours of the painting can be selected, and sites can be inspected.

Learn more about the Future Museum Studio, here.

A 3-day symposium hosted by the Future Museum Studio at SJTU.

Funded by the Shanghai Bureau of Education, and hosted by the Future Museum Studio at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, The Future Museum Symposium 2023 is a series of writings and public discussions that invite a select group of leading thinkers and practitioners in design, curation, technology, art, and museum administration from around the world to bring their ideas, projects, critiques, and questions, and help us gauge the state of the museum as it is being actively transformed into the museum of the future

The symposium was organized by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, the Director of the Future Museum Studio at SJTU, John Russick, FMS Visiting Director of International Projects, and Jack Ludden, a technology expert working with Balboa Park Online Collaborative. The symposium featured discussions and written vision statements by Lonnie Bunch (Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution), Cristian Bianchi (Director of Keepthinking.it), Benjamin Filene (Head of Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of American History), Joy Bivins (Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library), and Koven Smith (Senior Director of Arts at the Knight Foundation).

Symposium opening statement by Lonnie Bunch

by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, revised for the 3rd edition of Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium (chapter 13), edited by Vladimer Geroinko, Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer Press, 2022.

Excerpt:

Augmented Reality, in all its permutations of live manipulated media, is the first truly network-age screen media— not just movies broadcast over electric wires, or recorded on to digital media, or enhanced through computer-calculated effects, but a medium which takes live media manipulation as its essence and material. With this acceleration, we can look back to excavate the material shift from the filmic image to the electric one.

The Future Museum Studio (FMMIS) is a research center, founded in 2021, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industries. It is a long-term project to partner with museums, and image archives to create new-technology media experiences of history—especially in Shanghai. FMMIS hosts symposia, sponsors classes and lectures, and conducts experimental creative projects and scholarly researh. More: fmmis.org

Virtual Reality history experience with the Chicago History Museum, 2020.

Chicago00: : 1893 World's Columbian Exposition is a VR experience of 16 sites along Midway Plaisance and Jackson parks, and archival photography that shows the world's fair that happened there over a century ago. The experience focuses on the fair's Midway, where millions of our nation of immigrants came together to gawk at a pageant of luxury, entertainment and exoticism.

The experience has been released as a web portal with 16 VR sites, and a gallery of almost 90 historic images, never before brought together in this way. The centerpiece is a reconstruction of the 1893 Ferris Wheel experience using VR drone videography, 3D architectural animations, and over a dozen photos taken from the wheel in 1893.

This Chicago00 episode is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the NEH).

View the web portal, here.

Created as part of THE CHICAGO ØØ PROJECT

Virtual Reality history experience with the Chicago History Museum, 2018/2020.

Chicago00: : 1933 DNC Protests is a virtual reality experience of Grant Park on August 28th, 1968 when protestors and police violently clashed. Released on the 50th anniversary of the events, audiences can now see historical film and photos taken that day superimposed on new 3D virtual reality photos of the site, with narration by Dr. David Farber, author of "Chicago '68."

The 15 minute 3D VR tour with narration has to be viewed on Youtube or on Facebook 360. View the VR experience, here.

In 2020, the experience was launched as a web portal, though which audiences can explore the map of all the sites, see the panoramas, and explore an extensive photo gallery. View the web portal, here.

Created as part of THE CHICAGO ØØ PROJECT

Virtual Reality history experience with the Chicago History Museum, 2018.

Chicago ØØ:  A Century of Progress is a virtual reality experience of Chicago's 1933 World’s Fair. Historical images from the Chicago History Museum’s photography and film archives are combined with contemporary 360 degree site photography to immerse audiences in an experience of a specific place and time in the past. Chicago00:  A Century of Progress provides a unique view into the fleeting and sensational city within a city that attracted nearly 50 million visitors to the shores of Lake Michigan in the midst of the Great Depression.

View the VR experience, here.

Created as part of THE CHICAGO ØØ PROJECT

A video installation at the 150 Media Stream in the Riverside Plaza.
 
(Geoffrey Alan Rhodes / 2017, 25.5 min.)

'Spaces' was created for display on the Media Stream 150— the largest screen in Chicago spanning 3,000+ square feet located in the lobby of the 150 North Riverside tower. This 33 megapixel, 150 by 22 foot video is here presented in VR so it can be viewed remotely.

'Spaces' explores the Chicago History Museum’s archive of Hedrich Blessing photographs— thousands of images captured by the world-famous architectural photography firm between 1929 and 1979. Five decades of Chicago architectural history are pulled apart and then stitched back together into ever-morphing composites of the city’s remarkable architectural legacy. Using thematic groupings and algorithmic image processing, Spaces is a computational exploration of an entire photo archive. The experience reveals the eye of the photographer as a historical window onto Chicago as a designed and constructed environment. This experience is part of CHICAGO ØØ, an initiative by the artist and the Museum to create immersive historical encounters with the city using new technologies.

View a VR timelapse of the installation, here.

Augmented Reality public art with the Chicago History Museum, 2016.

Chicago.0,0 AR Experience demoed at Design Matters, October 2015.

Chicago 0,0 is a series of Augmented Reality mobile apps that will creatively share images from the Chicago History Museum’s massive photo archive, many never before seen. Selections from the archive are published to audiences outside the Museum through an Augmented Reality mobile experience: images superimposed onto corresponding sites through image recognition.

With production grant funding from the Princess Grace Foundation, Chicago 0,0 is currently producing its first episode: a narrated immersive AR tour of the Chicago Riverwalk, to be published to the app marketplace summer 2016. A prototype of this experience was demoed in a live AR tour for a group of curators at the Design Matters conference in Chicago, October 2015.

Chicago.0,0 Downtown State Street AR experience as demoed at Museums and the Web, April 2015.

Featured on the cover of Code Words: Technology and Theory in the Museums.

An Augmented Reality public art project, Sacramento, 2014.

The Broadway Corridor Virtual Public Art Project, Sacramento, CA, September–December, 2014.

Commissioned by the Sacramento Arts Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Broadway Augmented is a temporary and virtual public art project on Broadway in Sacramento, California. Eleven artists from around the country have designed public artworks for sites on Broadway that can only be viewed in real time on an Apple or Android phone or other smart device.

App Design and Technical Direction: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

A report in Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus, College Art Association, Fall 2014 | ISSN: 1942-017X.

Excerpt:

C-print (GARhodes, 2014).

An AR-Enhanced Sculptural Opera and Fashion Show (2014).

By Claudia Hart in collaboration with composer Edmund Campion,
AR Design by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.

Premiere March, 2014, Eyebeam Media Arts Center, NYC; exhibition May, 2014, Bitforms Gallery, Chelsea.

Julie Robinson; photo: Sophie Kahn.  

Nayland Blake and Julie Robinson; photo: Abigail Simon.  

The Alices Walking, A film by Artur Ratton, 2014, 15min.  

From ClaudiaHart.com:

Augmented Reality performance lecture (2013).

An AR performance lecture first presented at the Yeongwol International Museum Forum, Korea, 2013. Published in Media - N: Journal of the New Media Caucus Spring 2014. Published as multi-media AR publication in Public Art Dialogue, Spring 2015.

C-print (GARhodes, 2013).

Limited edition custom plate set with Augmented Reality app,
by Claudia Hart, AR Design by G.A.Rhodes (2013).

From ClaudiaHart.com:

With the Nue Morte porcelain dish, an erotic transgressive layer of imagery floats in an illusory space across your supper. And just as our dreams arise from the unconscious, augmented projections manifest in an illusory liminal space... the puerile truth behind the sophisticated bourgeois world of interior decoration and design.

Exhibited and sold at Bitforms, NYC, and The New Museum store.

Augmented Reality art app for smartphone (2012).

This 100 Kroner note is not a Euro! When the viewer presents a 100 Kroner note to their smartphone, the bill is replaced in their view with an emphatic, celebratory reminder, “Not a Euro!” Hugo Frey Jensen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and even Carl Nielsen are there on hand to certificy and declare, this note OK.

notAeuRo (GARhodes 2012) Presented as part of CONVERSATIONS at the Copenhagen Art Festival, along with the AR(t) collective, Manifest.AR. Made with Layar.

Augmented Reality art app for smartphone (2012).

Tired of always hearing what the Founding Fathers would say? It's time for them to listen! Instantly create an attentive audience of the American Founding Fathers lovingly presented on rolled currency! Talk back to money!

The Founding Fathers! (GARhodes 2012), an Augmented Reality art app created as part of the Manifest.AR exhibition at LA RePlay, CAA 2012. Made with Layar.

C-print, 24" x 18" (GARhodes, 2012).

B&W polaroid passport camera 'selfie' (GARhodes 2012).

Augmented Reality art app for smartphone (2011).

Present a US dollar bill to the smartphone camera. Each bill becomes an I.O.U. and reminds us, "The United States of America owes China One Dollar." Oh no! Mao wants this dollar!

Maodollar, Mao Wants This Dollar! (GARhodes 2011), an Augmented Reality art app created for the Manifest.AR exhibition at the ICA, Boston Cyberarts Festival 2011. Built in Junaio.

C-prints, 24" x 16" (GARhodes, 2011).

Framed LCD screen with HD video and sound, (GARhodes, 2011).

First exhibited at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY

This piece was inspired by the publication of Chris Marker's film 'La Jetée' in book form several years ago. I wanted to capture the inherent tension and irony in that publication...

86 min. feature film, 2010,
by Steven Eastwood and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.

Part documentary, part drama, Buried Land tells the story of ordinary people attempting to realize a dream. Two actors cut a path through the real community and strange reality of Visoko, the small town at the heart of a remarkable claim: the discovery of ancient pyramids, not in Egypt, but central Bosnia...

Funded by The Princess Grace Foundation, USA and the AHRC, UK

Site & Sound - Best Films of 2010. Official Selection: Tribeca International Film Festival 2010 (Premiere), Moscow Int'l, Bosnian Programme Sarajevo Int'l, Mumbai Int'l, Cottbus Int'l, Germany, Göteborg Int'l, Sweden, Bosnian—Herzegovinian Film Festival, NYC, Skena Up Film Festival, Kosovo, 2010 Beyond/In WNY Contemporary Art Biennale.

Produced and Directed by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes and Steven Eastwood.

Augmented reality installation, 2010.

A re-dux of the 52Card Psycho project. Here the extreme closeups and high-suspense music of Sergio Leone create a sculptural tesseract of cinema. We uncover the scene's contents: totem poles of faces, guns, and barren landscapes.

Produced with the SnapDragonAR architecture, developed at the Future Cinema Lab at York University, Toronto.

Framed LCD screens slideshows (GARhodes, 2010)

First exhibited at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

This piece, made for the 2009 CEPA members show in Buffalo, was inspired by Douglas Gordon's 'Selfportrait as Kurt Cobain'. Using the half-animation of the LCD screen slideshow, a series of posterized self-portraits are shown on the large screen. My ear has been amputated by Photoshop, but it has been appropriated on a smaller LCD screen that dangles by its power cord.

C-prints (GARhodes, 2010)

Augmented reality installation (2009)

52Card Psycho is an installation-based investigation into cinematic structures and interactive cinema viewership. The concept is simple: 52 cards, each printed with a unique identifier, are replaced in the subject's view by the individual shots that make up a movie scene: the 52 shots that make up the shower scene of Hitchcock's Psycho. The cards can be stacked, dealt, arranged in their original order or re-composed in different configurations, creating spreads of time. The technology used is marker-based augmented reality, where special printed markers are recognized in the video feed and pass data regarding their unique identifier, their position, and their orientation. The computer then feeds a display overlaying the video clips of each shot onto the appropriate card and continually mapping their position and orientation.

The 52 Card Cinema project is an exemplar of the unique architecture of cinematic pieces mapped on to the real world, made possible by AR technology. The medium of the animated image, in its wedding with the real world, loses the privileged linearity of the screen, and gives the opportunity to re-perceive cinema as the juxtaposition of its parts.

First installed at the juried exhibition of the International Society for Electronic Arts, Belfast 2009. Also exhibited at the European Media Arts Festival, juried exhibition, Osnabrück, Germany, 2010, and by invitation at the Poznan Biennale (Mediations) 2010, Poland, the Beyond In Western New York biennale 2010, Buffalo, New York, and the Microwave International Media Arts Festival, Hong Kong, 2010.

Produced with the SnapDragonAR architecture, developed at the Future Cinema Lab at York University, Toronto.

Solo video installation show, Big Orbit Gallery, 2008.

Four rear-projected plexiglass walls enclose the viewer in a semi-private space for viewing the five Mirror Series videos, played in paired sequences. Outside a set of half-silvered mirrors create reflections and images of other video and slide projections.

Installed June, 2008, Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation

HD video with sound, 9min. (GARhodes, 2008)

Another piece stemming from my fascination with the Chris Marker film. Here I scan through the 16mm film print of La Jetée using a shutterless viewer (actually a library microfiche viewer). Ironically the viewer animates what was intended as still, and makes invisible the intended climactic animation of the woman in bed. A second, surreal film is created.

65min. documentary film, 2007,
by Bernadette Wegenstein and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.

What have our bodies become in an age of seemingly limitless transformation? MADE OVER IN AMERICA combines the style of reality television with experimental film to weave together the voices of producers and consumers, surgeons and their patients, clinical psychologists, media theorists, and youth who are coming of age in a culture where bodies seem to be customizable. Together they form a picture of how the desire for a better self operates within consumer culture and how this desire is fed by media, the makeover industry and culture at large.

Bronze Award, 2008 Health and Science Communications Association Media Festival.

Distributed by Icarus Films.

Produced and Directed by Bernadette Wegenstein and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

Multi-channel video for 3-screen installation, 4min. (GARhodes, 2007)

Exhibitions/screenings: Gallery 164, Buffalo, NY; Hamilton Art Gallery, Ontario.

Each screen displays one of three sequential performances that are synced into a new 'live' time. Loosely choreographed dance is performed to the un-heard soundtrack of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" playing to headphones. The three tracks of binaural audio captures the embodied music of the steps and scratches of feet dancing on the floor: the transcendent awkward detritus of this common dis-embodied situation. The three performances, exactly synced with the music playing un-heard in each, create a virtual dance playspace where I meet myself.

Video essay produced for the Filmic Interval conference at the Slade Research Center, London, UK, 6.75min. (GARhodes, 2006)

Metonymy & Multichannel critically analyzes multi-channel video in its own form. A narrated video, using imagery from Rhodes' many multi-channel films, critically analyzes the signifying structure and possibilities of multi-channel in terms of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Roland Barthes.

11min. experimental 35mm film, 2005 (re-cut 2009)
Produced and Directed by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.

Tesseract draws a line between photographer Eadweard Muybridge's obsession with photographing movement and his act of jealous murder in 1873.

Muybridge's life and work became a fracturing of time where duration is sliced, mechanized, and stopped from flowing - this was a temporal insanity that led to cinema itself: the re-animation of the frozen image.

Muybridge's form, a spatial layout of time, is used here in film. The screen is split into panels, a moving photographic layout, fracturing our perspective of time, and the narrative of Muybridge's life.

tes·ser·act : a four dimensional cinema-cube stretching through time.

Director, Writer, Editor: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes
Producer: Sarah JM Kolberg
Director of Photography: Vincenzo Mistretta
Production Designer: Leslie J. Walker
Costume Designer: Geraldine Duskin

“Best Photography,” Jutro Filmu film festival, Warsaw, Poland, 2005.
“Best Film,” Lancaster Arts Festival, NY, 2005.
Syracuse International Film Festival official selection, NY, 2005.
TopKino Theatre, Vienna, 2005.
Albright Knox, special program, Buffalo, NY, 2008.
Frisian International Media Art Competition, The Netherlands, 2009.
360/365 Film Festival, Rochester, NY, 2010.

Multi-channel video for screening, 4min. (GARhodes, 2005).

Commissioned by Niagara Council for the Arts for the Sound Needs Image series @ The Carnegie Art Center, Tonawanda, NY.

Leaving, takes the virtual situation of multi-channel and refers it back to the actual. Here the multi-channel screen is created both through multiple cameras, and through the portals of a house. The house is made into a screen for the projection of memory, and the virtual, un-touchable nature of memory is expressed through the flat projected screen which can be moved, but not entered, leaving us homeless in the present.

Video with film for broadcast, 9min. (GARhodes, 2004).

Commissioned by Niagara Council for the Arts and Lockport Community Cable

Screenings: Lockport Community Cable; OMSK Film!Video!Performance!Sound!Mayhem!, London, UK; Rough & Ready @ Soundlab, Buffalo, NY; Pleasure Dome, Toronto

Taking the true story of Buffalo Monsignor Francis Keliher who in the 1930's wrestled under the moniker, The Masked Marvel, this film uses a combination of iconic images and simple text. The end product is a documentary that takes the imposition of story onto a history to the extreme, and insists on the iconic as epistemology in media.

Suspended video monitor for installation, 20min. (GARhodes, 2004).

Created for the Rough & Ready video installation show, Buffalo, NY, 2004. A durational performance, referencing Peter Campus' local work from the 70s, slowly explores a wanton gaze through a chroma-key hole. Performance by Jen Roth & Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.

3 channel video with sound, 3.5 minutes (GARhodes, 2003).

Screenings: Kamikaze Collective show, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY; Open Video Projects, Rome; Rat-Powered Film Festival, Santa Cruz.

Timecodes critically riffs off of Roland Barthes' and Chris Marker's fascination with the stopping of the moving image. Through multiple timeframes, the metonymic relationship of 'before' 'during' and 'after' are expressed.

He works across disciplines to create, for viewers and users, experiences which challenge the borders between the real and the virtual, the cinematic and the actual, fine art and popular experience. His work is a convolvement of feature films, gallery video art, photographic and new media applications; they have in common a sense of play in apparatus and traditional structures: actual subjects performing roles, transparent media machinations serving as 'stage', collisions of one medium with another. His feature films, media installations, and augmented reality publications have been prestigiously screened, exhibited, and published internationally. He is currently a tenured professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, where he is the Director of the Future Museum Media Innovation Studio.

by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes and Songhao Huang, for the book Augmented and Virtual Reality in the Metaverse (chapter 12), edited by Vladimer Geroinko, Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer Press, 2024.

An adapted version of this book chapter, titled, "AI & the Metaverse: AR and VR in sci-fi" can be read here.

A symposium hosted by the Future Museum Studio at SJTU.

Our 2022 series of lectures and discussions, Imagining Future Museum: What? How? Who?, was organized by FMS Director, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, and Paris-based exhibition designer, Mona Kim. The discussions featured Lāth Carlson, Executive Director of the Museum of the Future in Dubai, Todd Palmer, Director of Diversity in Design (Chicago), exhibition designers Olga Subirós and Mona Kim (Barcelona and Paris), Sacha Mitrofanoff, the Director of Exhibitions at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle Paris, and Songhao Huang, co-founder of Raiden Institute, a Shanghai leader in innovative metaverse curation.

English transcript with Chinese translation: Global symposium hosted by the Future Museum Studio at the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, May 26th, 2022. (Moderators: Mona Kim, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes. Discussants: Lath Carlson, Olga Subirós, Todd Palmer)

A pre-recorded keynote talk for the China Cultural Industry Development Forum, September 4, 2021 - Beijing (ciftis.org)

Museums and archives have collected enormous quantities of cultural media: historic paintings, photographs, films, recordings and documents. For the last 100 years, most people have only encountered a tiny fraction of this content through documentary films and printed photo books.

The Future Museum Studio (fmmis.org) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry is researching and developing new methods, and producing new experiences of media archives. Augmented and virtual reality are used to connect present day sites with their histories. AI and 3D sensors are used to create monumental screen-based displays of historic media. Archives are reimagined as vast resources for intellectual property that can be brought to new audiences, connect people with their history, and enrich the identity of the city.

This talk gives an overview of the studio’s research initiatives, and argues for the importance of using new media technologies to transform archives into public experiences.

Screenplay of the talk.

An interactive VR cyclorama: 1871.Chicago00.org
 
(Geoffrey Alan Rhodes / 2021, webXR platform)

Chicago00: 1871 Chicago Fire was created for the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire to provide an interactive media version of a study for the larger painted fire cyclorama that was first displayed in Chicago in 1892. Cycloramas were a popular attraction in the late 1800s and a precursor to present-day virtual-reality (VR) experiences providing audiences with immersive, life-like views of historical events. This web portal tries to reproduce that immersive experience of the painting, and the events of the Chicago fire of 1871, using an interactive VR web portal, annotations of important sites included in the painting, and accounts of Chicagoans’ encounters with the fire.

The project was completed in collaboration with John Russick and historian Carl Smith, as part of the Chicago 00 Project.

A video installation at Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai.
 
(Geoffrey Alan Rhodes / 2020, 4k, infinitely looping video)

This work is an experiment in exhibiting a very large archive of photography. In the gallery, a large 4K screen shows an algorithmic AI stitching together of an entire photo archive: the Hedrich Blessing archive of architectural photography from 1933-1969 at the Chicago History Museum, comprising more than 80,000 black and white photographic prints. Thousands of photographs of mid-century Chicago interiors are stitched together into a never-ending pan across a room. The algorithm stitches over both space and time transforming discrete photographs of multiple locations into a single continuous space displayed through time. It is an experiment in how we might communicate the massive and growing global archive of images numerous beyond human comprehension.

It was first shown in November 2020 at the annual ICCI Art Valley exhibition, 'Crossover', at Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai.

A video installation at the 150 Media Stream in the Riverside Plaza.
 
(Geoffrey Alan Rhodes / 2019, 20 min.)

This commissioned monumental video was a reprise of the 2018 work, Spaces, also commissioned by the 150 MediaStream. The Hedrich Blessing photo archive is explored, focusing on the presentation of the modern interior. The 20 minute piece uses thousands of images, constantly morphing and transition, to cover the 150 foot screen in the landmark building's lobby.

The Hedrich Blessing archive is the premier architectural photography archive in the United States. The Chicago-based firm, produced some of the most well-known images of 20th century American architecture, and their entire collection is now archived at the Chicago History Museum.

In the above video, the entire work is documented as an ultra-high resolution 360 panorama, so that viewers can get an impression of the immense detail displayed on site.

by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Chapter 1 in Augmented Reality Games I: Understanding the Pokémon GO Phenomenon, Edited by Vladimer Geroinko, Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer Press, 2019.

Excerpt:

We in the new media design community have awaited the AR ‘killer app’– an augmented reality experience so popular that it thrusts the medium into popular acceptance: The Great Train Robbery of AR, that would establish the fundamental language of the new medium and inspire augmented reality venues and audiences across the world. ...Something to finally make AR emerge.
Why didn’t Pokémon GO do this in 2016?

Virtual Reality history experience with the Chicago History Museum, 2017.

Chicago ØØ The St. Valentine's Day Massacre offers a six minute 360 VR interactive video with narration that can be viewed through Google Cardboard or 'magic window' mode, and the ability to zoom-in to examine individual archival photographs and learn more with extensive text captions.

The story brings photographs and documents from the Chicago History Museum's archive to the site of the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at 2122 N Clark St., featuring selections from the collections of the Chicago History Museum, Chicago Tribune Archive Photo/TNS, the John Binder Collection, and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. The photos collected here, some well-known, some rare, tell this familiar Chicago story in a new and compelling way.

The project was awarded the Silver MUSE for excellence by the American Alliance of Museums, and featured at the anniversary events at the National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement in Las Vegas.

View the VR experience, here.

Created as part of THE CHICAGO ØØ PROJECT

Augmented Reality history experience with the Chicago History Museum, 2016.

"Chicago 00 The Eastland Disaster" is an Augmented Reality experience that takes place along the Chicago riverwalk between Clark and LaSalle Streets: the site of one of the largest nautical disasters in U.S. history, the capsizing of the SS Eastland in 1915. The app provides an AR Tour, specifically designed to be used along Chicago’s riverwalk, and a VR Gallery of images that can be viewed anywhere. Together they reveal the story of the disaster in a new and visceral way.

Download the app, here.

Created as part of THE CHICAGO ØØ PROJECT

Marco Cavallo, Dept. of Computer Science, UIC
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Dept. of Visual Communication Design, SAIC
Angus Graeme Forbes, Dept. of Computer Science, UIC.

This paper introduces a user-centered Augmented Reality (AR) ap- proach for publishing 2D media archives as interactive content. We discuss the relevant technical considerations for developing an ef- fective application for public outdoor AR experiences that leverage context-specific elements in a challenging, real-world environment. Specifically, we show how a classical marker-less approach can be combined with mobile sensors and geospatial information in order apply our knowledge of the surroundings to the experience itself. Our contributions provide the enabling technology for Chicago 0,0 Riverwalk, a novel app-based AR experience that superimposes his- torical imagery onto matching views in downtown Chicago, Illi- nois along an open, pedestrian waterfront located on the bank of the Chicago River. Historical photographs of sites along the river are superimposed onto buildings, bridges, and other architectural features through image-based AR tracking, providing a striking ex- perience of the city’s history as rooted in extant locations along the river.

Read the full text, here.

Augmented Reality hybrid publication, 2015.

An AR app enhanced essay, to be published in Public Art Dialogue, Spring 2015. Based on the performance lecture of the same name, first presented at the Yeongwol International Museum Forum, Korea, 2013.

Augmented Reality performance presentation, 2015.

Documentation of the live AR presentation at the GLocal Symposium, “Posthumanism & Society,” NYU, May 9, 2015.

ABSTRACT:

There has been a certain romantic disappointment to the end of the broadcast era. Given the means of mediation-production and two-way distribution, society has not simply become unshackled from its Platonic cave chains to traipse in the democratic real but have delved deeper into mediation, screens, self-branding, avatars, and the co-mingling of virtual and real. In image reading and creation, this movement has two vectors: a realization of abstract virtuals, as Vilém Flusser describes, in which we are able to forget History in favor of programming and designing its images through data visualization, or alternately a new age of mediation in which the medium is an actor and we encounter images, including images of ourselves, in a mechanical juxtaposition in which images are selected and metonymically contextualized by agents that are not human... that is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

C-print, 18"x24" (GARhodes, 2014)

15-channel video installation at the M.I.R.C., London, 14 min., 2014.

A video essay composed for the University of East London's Moving Image Research Center multi-channel video Matrix lab comprised of 15 synchronized HD video screens. The three center screens were performed live before an audience in the lab.

The more than 30 million pixel presentation is here mixed down to 4K VR.

The Book of the Virtual and Real is a narrative immersive video installation: a virtual essay combining pre-recorded performance, sampled video, and live augmented reality on the multiple screens of the Moving Image Research Centre at the University of East London. This self-reflexive media essay investigates and excavates our changing relationships to the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ in contemporary media. It is a critical examination of the ontological and epistemological challenges of life with many screens, live media glasses and goggles, and immersive media experiences. The viewer is surrounded by a looping video essay that combines pre-recorded video with live AR experiences cued and sequenced.

4K video quadric, 4.5 min., 2014.

This video was originally produced as part of The Book of the Virtual and Real (2014). Through simple compositing, a fictional EMS Titanic eats itself and the film.

Video presentation, 2014.

After Cinema: art in the age of mechanical juxtaposition - a public presentation by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Chicago, Feb. 19, 2014.

Using 'After Cinema' to describe both the state of contemporary media as well as my own practice, I narrate my artistic career from filmmaker, to video installation artist, to interactive art and augmented reality app designer, as an archeology of media. Through exploring my history with work and medium(s), this presentation pulls apart the changing relationship between the real and the virtual, the self and the mediated, in media art.

by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Chapter 6 in Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium, Edited by Vladimer Geroinko, Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Springer Press, 2014.

Excerpt:

Augmented Reality, in all its permutations of live manipulated media, is the first truly network-age screen media— not just movies broadcast over electric wires, or recorded on to digital media, or enhanced through computer-calculated effects, but a medium which takes live media manipulation as its essence and material. With this acceleration, we can look back to excavate the material shift from the filmic image to the electric one.

C-print (altered glass-negative), 18"x24" (GARhodes, 2013)

by Steven Eastwood & Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Chapter 11 in Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Edited by Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, published by Berghahn Books, Oxford/ New York, 2013.

Excerpt:

Dramatic scenes are book-ended by returning to the view of Visocica, looming above Visoko, unchanged and inscrutable. Sometimes redolent of the supernatural, like the mountains in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Roberto Rosellini’s Stromboli, at other times merely tectonic, a vista for extrapolating cultural constructions and political struggles, like the landscapes in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space or the ‘lakescapes’ of James Benning. xvi If anything, it is not the photographic process that captures the slippery changing identity of this landscape, but the effect of montage over duration. Like Kuleshov’s trick, each time we return to the image of the Visocica, it’s meaning is changed by what we have seen and heard in preceding scenes and sequences, so that in one instance it must be pyramid, only later to be merely hill.

An article for Adobe.com 'Education resources', Jan.2013, describing the use of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to make apps as art books during my 3-week Summer Interim course, Electronic Publication Studio.

A special two-week visiting faculty workshop in the Department of Visual Communication at Tsinghua University, Beijing, November, 2012.

  A selection of class projects.

Course description:

The definition of the Design field has changed over the past decade. What began as the confluence of graphic design, programming, photography, and video production in web design has blossomed into a set of media and industries including the proliferation of new types of publications for devices including ebooks, apps, as well as interactive screen-based art. What was once mainly the area of film production—analysis and creative practice in the moving image— has become a broad media context in which designers create. And no longer are we presented with the simple screens of the movie theater or the television, but instead windowed environments, multiple screens, multiple channels of moving imagery presented on an array of devices. It is now vital that the contemporary designer have a solid understanding of both how to analyze and how to manipulate the moving image: moving image loops, tableau vivant, temporal montage, spatial montage surround us. This special two week course will introduce students to that vital territory.

45min.looping video in wall-mounted framed LED screen (GARhodes, 2012).

An eternity of popup windows are generated; each with their own unique background color. In time, the computer will crash, or the entire palette will be layered.

Augmented Reality performance lecture (2012).

Augmented Reality and the Cinema of Attractions; as presented at the XIV International Film & Media Studies Conference in Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, May 25, 2012.

With addendums and iterations presented at the Society for Literature Science and the Arts (SLSA), Milwaukee, 2012, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Chicago, 2013, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance (HASTAC), Toronto, 2013.

Augmented Reality art app for smartphone (2012).

Text has returned. Twitter is the cave painting of contemporary society. twitterAR visualizes that reality at the ZERO1 Biennale. Attendees at the ZERO1 site can see the constantly changing twitter trends of the bay area translated into internet-ideograms. Like a Rebus Puzzle, the objects talked about appear and disappear as they are spoken. Each post painting the primal artistic cave...

twittAR (GARhodes 2012) Presented at the Zero1 Biennial, along with the AR(t) collective, Manifest.AR. Made with Layar.

Augmented Reality performance lecture (2012).

An AR performance lecture first presented live at the Spouting Off performance lecture series, SAIC, Chicago, 2012.

Presented at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 5/2012.

With the proliferation of smartphones and free public apps such as Junaio and Layar, channels of virtual space paralleling real locations have become a new architectural space in which to create, exhibit, and distribute art. Though uncurated and uncontrolled, this virtual landscape draws on the aura of the real spaces in which it is anchored, playing at protest, playing at deconstruction, without ever completely manifesting.

C-print (stitched panorama from tracking shot), 60" x 12" (GARhodes, 2010)

Augmented reality installation (2010)

ARambo is, in essence, a translation between media. New Media artists and theorists have an abiding fascination with looking over their shoulders to cinema as the root of moving image media. In ARambo, I use marker-based augmented reality technology to look back on the entire oeuvre of the four Rambo feature films produced in the USA between 1982 and 2008— from the 1982 grieving over recent Vietnam War wounds, to the 1988 confusion of a cold war alliance with the Afghan Mujahadeen, to a 2008 reprisal with the American military hero old, tired, and looking for redemption, 'A Rambo' tracks both the history of the American action film blockbuster, and the popular ambivalence to American military empire through the aftermath of Vietnam, the end of the cold war, and a new era of new enemies and new wars. ARambo goes beyond deconstructing a single scene, and pulls apart an entire genre. The component pieces of the films (the explosions, the chokings, the hunting in the woods) become looping icons in a deck of cards, with which the user can build houses, deal hands, shuffle, and create juxtapositions of the elements of the serial action genre unseen before. It is a media translation both forwards and backwards— using new media technologies, the 50 year old film is translated to an older imagistic medium, one of loose interaction and game play: the deck of cards. It's a little like being in the film editing room, or even farther... like being the film in the camera itself: a film from a film's perspective, you see all parts at once and out of sequence.

First installed at the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, Grizedale Park, Cumbria, UK, April 2010. Also exhibited at the Microwave International Media Arts Festival, Hong Kong, and Gradually Melt the Sky, Devotion Gallery, Brooklyn.

Produced with the SnapDragonAR architecture, developed at the Future Cinema Lab at York University, Toronto.

15 Archival Photos, 60" x 100" (15, 20-inch panels), GARhodes, 2010

First exhibited at Visual Studies Workshop's Siskend Gallery, Rochester, NY.

This photograph was computed from the process of algorhythmic panoramic stitching of the over 2000 still photographs from Eadweard Muybridge's Motion Studies captured as part of the post production process of the short film, "Tesseract." The computer has attempted to find spatial correlations in the sequential temporal images, and in the process constructed crystalline amalgamations of images that evoke complex enfoldings of time; it is literally a view into four dimensional tesseract space.

HD video 4min. (GARhodes, 2010)

First exhibited at the opening of the new Burchfield Penney Arts Center, Buffalo, NY.

To produce this piece, I performed (jumped) in a pitch-black studio while being recorded with a slow-shutter camera. Individual frames were exposed by photo-strobes which became part of the performance. Several takes were overlaid, seeking out a sort of quantum film space of frames.

LCD screen slideshow with audio (GARhodes, 2009)

First exhibited at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Weekend is part of a series of works that explore algorithmic image-making, seeking out tensions between the still and moving image. Here Godard's famous tracking shot from Weekend has been converted into its still frames and then run through an algorithmic panorama creator. The resulting impossible panoramas, fractured by time but not space, riff off of the collision in the original images and audio of that scene.

HD multichannel video with sound, 5min. (GARhodes, 2009)

First exhibited at the Burchfield Penney Arts Center, Buffalo, NY.

This is a companion piece to my 2005 video work, 'Leaving', made upon my second departure from Buffalo in 2009.

Five 4min. looping videos designed for installation, 2008.

The bathroom mirror as the site for private rehearsal of the public persona is explored through a series of long-take performances through a magical post production circuit. This series functions as a digital update to the early auto-performance video work of artists such as Vito Accanci and Will Wegman. Here, instead of the live self-monitored video feed being the situation of performance, it is the digital circuit, the performer interacting with not only his own monitored image, but the knowledge of the magical post-production that will occur.

Installed: Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo, NY (solo show, "Double Narcissism"): Summer 2008; Arlington Arts Center 2010; Bumpershoot, Seattle 2011

Screened: Split Film Festival, Croatia; Moscow International Film Festival; Chelsea Art Museum, New York; Beyond/In Western New York, Buffalo; Shikenader, Vienna; Open Video Projects, Rome; OMSK, London.

Published in OMSKBOOK, edit. Clare Moloney, Arts Council England, 2007.

Funded by Big Orbit Gallery (NYSCA / Andy Warhol Foundation)

C-print, 24" x 18" (GARhodes, 2008)

C-print, 24" x 18" (GARhodes, 2008)

C-print, 24" x 18" (GARhodes, 2008)

C-prints, stitched panoramas (GARhodes, 2008)

A music video for The Sleeping Kings of Iona's "L.A. Gear" (2007)

Produced & Directed by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes & Christopher Ernst
Crewed by the members of SUNY Buffalo's Film/Video Hybrids class, Spring 2007.

Multiple looping 16mm projection for installation (2007)

Terminus (2007), multiple looping 16mm projection for installation; made in collaboration with the media arts collective, Buffalo Super Friends (Christopher Ernst, Jamie Currie, Leah Rico, and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes); commissioned by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for Artists & Models: Noctuminal @ Buffalo's Central Terminal. Music by Otto Mueller.

Screened in the Toronto Transit subway as part of the Toronto Urban Film Festival 2008.

Terminus attempts to create, in a multi-screen environment, a fantasy space of passage into travel and dream. The screens oscillate between 16mm images of a belly button and an underwater industrial fantasy-landscape—an aesthetic alla Guy Maddin.

Silver-nitrate prints with cyanotype on paper, (6) 24" x 8" (GARhodes, 2005)

A collaboration with composer, Otto Mueller.
Video with sound, 5 min (GARhodes, 2005).

Double-8 takes as its point of departure a particular situation of temporal documentation in the antique medium of double-8 film. One side of the screen is moving forwards in time in dual-frame, and the other side is moving backwards. Simple narrative actions are explored in these temporal loops and given an original orchestral score.

Silver-nitrate prints with cyanotype on paper, 18" x 32" (GARhodes, 2005)

Multi-channel video for screening, 4min. (GARhodes, 2004).

Screenings: 'Resolutions', Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo.

In Scopophilia, a three channel live-mix video is created through the display of two diegetic camera POVs—the two cameras strapped to the head as virtual eyes. A ritualistic performance is then documented: an enactment of what Baudrillard would call the hysteria of masculine sexuality.

Multi-channel video w/ film for screening, 4min. (GARhodes, 2003).

Screenings: Kamikaze Collective show, Buffalo, New York. Rutgers Film & Animation Festival, NJ.

Distance of the Observer takes as its point of inspiration an exchange made in a Joan Jonas video: "Where is your father in these pictures?" "Oh, he's behind the camera." Multi-channels and the difference between the film and video medium are used to express the separation inherent in the gaze and the hysteria of male sexuality in the specular.

Video with sound for screening, 5 minutes (GARhodes, 2003).

Screenings: European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruek, International Surrealist Film Festival, New York; Super 8 Film + Video Festival, Rutgers (honorable mention); Video Mundi, Chicago; Images Festival, Toronto.

Great Success was imagined as the first in a series of video shorts that attempt to fill the role set by William Blake, of text closely tied with abstracted imagery in his lithograph series, The Songs of Innocense and The Songs of Experience. Great Success was to be the first in a series of Songs of Fertility: each verse based story would tell a hyper-narrative of contemporary excess. Great Success toys with the creation of a fantasy-scape where the performance, aesthetic abstraction, and hyper-saturated video co-exist in harmonious and dissonant counter-point.