SFMOMA celebrates the start of construction at the site of the expansion– a defining moment for the museum's future. They are hosting a groundbreaking ceremony to kick off the 225,000-square-foot Snøhetta-designed expansion that will transform the museum as a whole. When the museum reopens in 2016, it will provide greater art experiences, more free-to-the-public space, and enhanced education programs for schoolchildren, expanding its role as a place for learning and inspiration in the Bay Area. During the exclusive groundbreaking ceremony, Mayor Edwin M. Lee, Snøhetta principal Craig Dykers, press and dignitaries alike will experience a reimagining of the museum's future building though an artist-commissioned augmented reality mobile application. 2012 ZERO1 Biennial artists Will Pappenhiemer and John Craig Freeman, created the "app-arition" that is both an interactive and animated assemblage of the building's various parts, reflecting its potential existence as a fluid network and beacon for the surrounding community as well.
Pappenhiemer and Freeman work with emergent forms of augmented reality as interventionist public art. They engage the medium as a way of transforming public space and institutions by installing virtual objects and artworks. ZERO1 had the pleasure of working with them through the international collective Manifest.AR during the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial. Manifest.AR is an international artists’ collective working with emergent forms of augmented reality as interventionist public art. The group sees this medium as a way of transforming public space and institutions by installing virtual objects, which respond to and overlay the configuration of located physical meaning. Utilizing this technology as artwork is an entirely new proposition and explores all that we know and experience as the mixture of the real and the hyper-real.
For the ZERO1 Biennial, Manifest.AR established an onsite installation for exhibition that had paralleled components at the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Titled “Manifest.AR @ ZERO1,” the group drew on collective art practices centered around mobile augmented reality apps that aggregate and map a series of works re-imagining and reinterpreting the high-tech corporate campuses and products of Silicon Valley.
The groundbreaking event also kicks off the museum’s Countdown Celebration, a free four-day public celebration (May 30 through June 2) leading up to SFMOMA’s launch out of the building and into the community. From June 3 until the museum’s newly expanded home reopens in early 2016, SFMOMA will be on the go, presenting new art experiences throughout the Bay Area and beyond. You can download and experience Pappenhiemer and Freeman’s augmented reality app following the groundbreaking ceremony.
More details about SFMOMA’s Groundbreaking and related events.
