Mock Objects [Artefact]

Mock Objects is a moving image artwork that forms part of a broader enquiry into gamification, ‘internet addiction’, and cloud-based processing platforms. This work seeks to make apparent the play of attention involved in engagement with online communications platforms, and the potential inaccuracy of digital processing in the cloud.

In July 2016, the augmented reality (AR) game Pokémon Go was released. My interest in the game was the way that it explored the permeable boundary between online and offline experience through a gamified interface, and seemed to be a nexus of attentional focus and filtering, data gathering, and addictive design strategy. I identified AR software and interfaces as holding potential to explore the edges between online and offline experiences.

The work used an open source augmented reality library to create an animation drawn from video of a user interacting with a smartphone. This library analysed a frame of live video and calculated two alternative best guesses for the orientation of the marker that was sensed, which are represented as two planes in 3D space. This was applied to swipe gestures carried out by the phone user. The error in the sensing system formed the main visual hallmark of the animation, as the planes flickered between states of uncertainty. A self-authored catalogue essay accompanied the exhibition of the work, which was followed by a symposium and evaluative essay.

The piece was positioned in the gallery alongside gallery infrastructure. The siting of the piece in the margins allows the work to oscillate between its status as a focus for the viewer’s attention and as potentially ignorable infrastructure. From this location, it proposes that human activity can be subjected to infrastructural algorithmic processing whose function is obscured from the user by its ubiquity and invisibility.