Portraiture & Augmented Relationships

This interactive work using LAYAR technology is a treasure hunt, a scrapbook, an autobiographical self-portrait told through the objects. It’s a portal, a performance piece, an ongoing narrative. All inanimate objects, like people, have a narrative and call out to tell their story.

In the first body of New Portraiture photographs from 2002, my approach was simply to take photographs of people I knew with the objects that they felt would best represent them or an aspect of themselves. I re-assembled these into portraits of people AS their objects. Then I wanted to rethink this approach and process.

I have waited for AR technology to be easily available to expand and amp up the narrative in these digital portraits. This an experiment in expanding a new narrative.

In August of 2013, I started photographing and cataloguing over two hundred objects, that have significance to me; which were pared down to the present twenty-two power tools, a Master Number.

This portrait is a road map of certain periods of my life. The mysterious dice came from an old 1930’s board game my Dad’s had as a child, my dad would give me and my brother something from his steamer trunk.  It got me in the habit of collecting curios and over the years I amassed countless  roots, bones, stones and skulls that had called out to me over the years of  wanderings in the world. Some of these objects are talismans, while others simply curios. This collection of tools includes some important artifacts that played important parts at pivotal times in life. Some of these object became emblematic in my personal artwork, as paintings, drawings or sculture.

In the print there is a narrative structure implied by the placement of the objects. When I work with them they are used in tandem, they are dialoguing and in relationship with each other.

Though they appear in a fixed setting in the two dimensional portrait, each viewer will randomly choose how to interact with them. Each and every choice offers a different narrative structure to the understanding and unraveling of this portrait. There is an unlimited number of dialogues and through the associated blog an opportunity for evolving conversation.

NB