Cork Film Centre, Ireland

Bennett, A 2013, Shifting Skin, giclee prints with augmented reality overlay, held at Cork Film Centre Gallery, Ireland, May 2016, http://www.corkfilmcentre.com/current-exhibition/

AR instructions

 Exhibition catalogue featuring essay by Kate Warren HERE

Shifting Skin is an elegant statement on the collapsing boundaries between material and virtual via the connecting metaphor of skin. The uncannily flattened images of human surface were captured using a re-purposed flatbed scanner held directly against the subject’s body. When viewed through an app on a mobile screen, a 3D topography appears to project out of the print, a landscape of peaks and valleys describing the tonal scale within the surface of the subject, the terrain of scars, tattoos, skin tone and texture.

This direct interplay between the physical print and virtual object creates a tangible dynamic to be physically explored by the viewer. Although augmented reality is an internet application, the experience is locative and embodied. The viewer must be physically in front of the trigger image and move in an arc before the print to trace the contours of the 3D virtual object.

Shifting Skin has generated considerable international attention since it was first exhibited at Deakin University Art Gallery in 2013, stemming from a retweet by cyberpunk author William Gibson and a report by Mashable.com that appeared in the Huffington Post. The work has since featured in the Sydney Mardi Gras visual arts program, ABC TV news, & the uber hip Theorizing the Web conference in New York City. Shifting Skin was described as a program highlight at Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery and Wyndham Cultural Centre.

More info about Shifting Skin here: https://alisonbennett.net/shifting-skin/