Layers of Place is a site-based AR exhibition that transforms Austin’s public spaces into portals for memory and imagination, revealing hidden histories and futures through location-based works created with local artists and community partners.
Produced by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s AR and Public Space Artist Collective and in Austin with local artists and community partners, the exhibition transforms public spaces into portals for memory, history, and imagination, revealing hidden layers of place through location-based AR. Across the city, projects explore erased histories, climate futures, technology, embodiment, and everyday acts of care—inviting communal encounters that reframe Austin as a living, participatory archive shaped by those who inhabit it.
Humble Monuments reimagines overlooked patches of urban ecology as living monuments to coexistence, resilience, and climate futures. A participatory AR experience, illuminating fragile, poetic entanglements between humans and the natural world.More about Humble Monuments: A Field Guide to the Unseen.
Open Access Memorial is an Augmented Reality memorial dedicated to Aaron Swartz, an internet pioneer and activist who contributed to the development of RSS and Creative Commons. In 2011, Swartz was arrested by the MIT Police, an event linked to his death.More about Open Access Memorial.
ORYZA: Healing Ground is an augmented reality art installation that uses a custom Afrocentric AI system to reimagine colonial archives, centering Black land stewards and revealing how the past continues to shape our digital future.More about Oryza: Healing Ground.
Paper Boat is a site-specific playable AR artwork that confronts the invisibility of sea-level rise, immersing spect-actors in real-time flooding, melting glaciers, and plastic waste as they race to navigate a human figure safely to a boat.
Move between memories. Moving Memory uses AR to enhance how New Public Art’s interactive artwork Kempelen’s Owls makes a place to bridge the relationships between nature and technology, geometric and organic, clandestine and open, seen and hidden.
The Founders Pillars’ a site responsive AR experience transforming the neoclassical pillars of the Texas State Capitol into a memorial for African Americans, confronting histories of slavery, coerced labor, and power through decolonial futurist storytelling. More about The Founders Pillars.
