A-live

YEAR

2022

CATEGORY

Augmented Reality

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What does it mean to be alive?

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If you ask a computer, an Oxford Languages dictionary definition will come up with a list of various synonyms under each definition: breathing, moving, flourishing, sentient, and animate are just a few. This concept is expressed in the augmented reality experience a-live.

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The name of the piece is a play on words. To be “alive” is to be living, to live. Yet the English prefix a- is to be without, to lack, to not. This reality encapsulates both: to be alive and, simultaneously, not alive. The models are posed as if they are in motion as living, breathing things despite remaining fixed in place. At first glance, they differ very little from the rest of the botanical garden, but upon inspection, they’re clearly mechanical imitations of alive things.Even the experience itself is in genuine; the life you see does not exist in a reality outside the screen it’s viewed on.

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The photographs taken on the initial visit to Sarah Duke Gardens focused on the grand beauty of the space. One depicts the perfect organization of flowers in their beds lining the steps up to the pavilion. The site I chose is an empty corner of a flower bed, one that was merely a part of the pictures I initially took. The intention of this site was not grandeur, but a nod towards subtly and integration.

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‍A-live is a commentary on human presence amidst a natural world. Science is an undeniably beautiful and powerful phenomenon. It seeps into every aspect of our lives and is so integrated into everything that we almost don’t even notice. There’s almost an urge with the development of technology to play god. No longer do we see ourselves as part of nature, but as something that simply accommodates it based on how we see it fit for ourselves. We make gardens as a celebration of the natural world, and yet we can’t help but impose our own sense of order onto it; flowers are organized by color in type into perfect rows and sections. There’s beauty but also a sense of invasiveness. The sharp edges juxtapose the soft in-motion poses. If you look close enough, there are wires throughout the body of the dragonflies. The flowers and the dragonflies look both stiffly metal yet vibrant with movement and intention. The models are meant to reflect this sense of simultaneous beauty and invasion of technology and humanity onto the natural world, particularly the relationship between us as humans and the natural world and how we interact with it through and with technology.

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