ABSTRACT From ARToolkit’s emergence in the 1990s to the emergence of augmented reality (AR) as an art medium in the 2010s, AR has developed as a number of evidential sites. As an extension of virtual media, it merges real-time pattern recognition with goggles (finally realizing William Gibson’s sci-fi fantasy) or handheld devices. This creates a welding of real-time media and virtual reality, or an optically registered simulation overlaid upon an actual spatial environment. Commercial applications are numerous, including entertainment, sales, and navigation. Even though AR-based works can be traced back to the late 1990s, AR work requires some understanding of coding and tethered imaging equipment. It was not until marker-based AR, affording lower entries to usage, as well as geo-locational AR-based media, using handheld devices and tablets, that augmented reality as an art medium would propagate. While one can argue that AR-based art is a convergence of handheld device art and virtual reality, there are intrinsic gestures specific to augmented reality that make it unique. The author looks at some historical examples of AR as well as critical issues of AR-based gestures such as compounding the gaze, problematizing the retinal, and the representational issues of informatic overlays. This generates four gestural vectors, analogous to those defined in “The Translation of Art in Virtual Worlds,” which is examined through case studies. From this, a visual theory of augmentation will be proposed.

In the technological sector, the first development stage of a product is known as ‘Alpha’ phase. The essay posits that techno-industrial culture and the production of technological art have been superimposed to the point where artists are often indistinguishable from commercial entities trying to sell the next hype-laden device. This is also true in the case of intangible on-line art, as market and institutional forces rematerialize net and other forms of screen-based art. The combination of hype and the temporal constraints of development and production result in a milieu where professed claims seldom live up to the final product. The cycle of promotion of the ‘Next Big Thing,’ whether art, data, or consumer object, outstrips any possibility for finished products to keep pace with expectations raised by the ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta’ prerelease stages. The result is an inordinate degree of media attention focused on ideas that are barely out of conceptual stages or ‘Alpha Revision,’ so that conceptual artists of the informational milieu must become engaged in the high-speed production of concept proposals, or ‘Alpha Revisionist’ works.

The emergence of many new media art genres calls into question qualitative issues in regards to performance in virtual and electronic spaces. What constitutes performance in technological art, and how can we form a critique of new media performance by analyzing these aesthetic spaces? This essay forms an analysis of technological performance, and of the “performative” in new media through the use of cybernetics as a critical tool.