GORDON

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2018

Gordon was an augmented reality (AR) based work that was part of a wider project at the gallery led by Novak titled The Expanded Gallery. “In The Expanded Gallery, Shannon Novak explores the potential to extend his work beyond the physical boundaries of the gallery. Expanding from the gallery walls into a range of physical and digital realms, this is a project that explores the potential of an art work to create different layers and experiences across multiple sites” (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2018).

The work

In 2017, Novak developed Gordon with Nick Young, a Visualisation Engineer at the University of Auckland Centre for eResearch. Novak began experimenting with AR through the use of smartphone enabled AR in 2013, creating virtual overlays and sculptures in space that would appear when a viewer held their mobile device toward a specific object, or stood in a specific location. Gordon was the next step, removing the need for a handheld device by using an AR headset, in this case the Microsoft HoloLens (released in 2016).

Gordon, named after New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, was a three dimensional virtual sculpture the audience could interact with using gestures and voice commands. The viewer would put the headset on and see the sculpture floating in gallery space and be able to walk around it, examining it from any angle as you would a physical sculpture. They could then change the size and location of the sculpture using hand gestures in the air and change the appearance of the sculpture using voice commands. For example, visitors could say “change to pink” or “change to green” to change the colour of the sculpture. If the viewer said “Gordon”, the sculpture would light up and play an audio composition developed by Novak. More than one viewer could engage with the sculpture at a time.

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

This video documentation shows Gordon in different sections of the gallery.