fЯAgments

“fЯAgments” is an Augmented Reality project with which the user, via smartphone or tablet, has the ability to access intangible constructions in central areas of the city of Thessaloniki.

Public space has always been an expanded field of communication and creation for societies. In the past, each culture connected the natural points of space to invisible levels of meaning and content as part of collective or even personal memory. Nowadays, according to Gregory Ulmer¹, contemporary societies have taken a significant turn from writing and reading in print to a new digital, online reality. Therefore, there is a need for modern monuments that reflect this networked collective sense, something that the technology of Augmented Reality is now able to offer and merge these invisible layers of memory and culture with a natural location.

In particular, a possible condition is examined, through which archival material as fragments of narratives concerning a natural point are made distinct, in real time and place, overlapping the real image of the landscape. At first, the material collected, sometimes by statutory and sometimes by non-statutory bodies, decomposes, losing its original form and then reassembling into a new entity with different qualities from those of the archive, as an intangible construction connected to its original mnemonic substantiation.

The purpose of the application is to offer an alternative context where physical space is visually mixed with elements related to the past and its historical events, or, in other words, a scenario of concern on whether such an interaction between work and viewer can extend the meaning of place beyond its material and visual dimension.

1. Ulmer, G. (2003). Internet invention: from literacy to electracy. New York: Longman