Data Narratives: Aesthetic Activation of Urban Space Through Augmented Reality

Abstract

This chapter discusses Data Narratives, a commissioned augmented reality artwork resulting from a period as artist in residence with Dublin City Dashboard. Data Narratives focused on working with city data to create hybrid artistic representations of Dublin’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, acting both as activist artistic engagement with the socio-political-economic space of the city and aesthetic activation of urban space through augmented reality. As data describes and defines so much of our digital every day, the project and residency programme asked how it could be leveraged as a medium for artistic creation and how could art supply new insights into these data and the life worlds they describe? Additionally, the project explored collaborative methodologies working in AR, increasingly important for artists producing complex AR works with the latest generation AR toolkits. The chapter gives an account of this project detailing its ambition to utilize AR art to build AR prototypes that over-layered city neighbourhoods with a series of cell phone-based data-driven AR narratives. Contextual location-based narratives visualize and engage complex issues. The process of building an artistic AR layer built on civic data is detailed, and the paper discusses its provision of a contextual layer that promoted reflection, informed debate, supported decision making, while connecting city residents with their city through renditions of its data.