Through this new LAS commission, Judy Chicago continues her long-running Atmospheres series, inviting global audiences to experience a newly created Smoke Sculpture™ in Augmented Reality (AR).
Chicago is renowned as an artist, author, feminist, educator and intellectual whose career spans ve decades. She began her Atmospheres series in the late 1960s, working with pyrotechnics to produce complex rework pieces and presented as ephemeral, site-specific performances intended to transform and soften the landscape.
As an artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the physical experience of these works, Judy Chicago Rainbow AR marks a new stage in Chicago’s long history with pyrotechnics, working with new AR technologies to push the boundaries of the medium.
Produced in close collaboration with LAS and experience designers International Magic, Chicago has created a new form of her Smoke Sculptures TM, which will now be brought into the digital realm. During this uncertain time when public gatherings are limited and our relationships with personal and public spaces are changing, Judy Chicago Rainbow AR will be accessible to audiences wherever they are based, allowing them to have their own site-specific experience, activating and ‘beautifying’ their own surroundings. The artwork will be available as an app, which can be downloaded from Google Play or the App Store and will be compatible with a broad range of mobile devices.
Bringing individuals together through their experience of the work, Judy Chicago Rainbow AR will unfold as an interactive performance, releasing plumes of smoke and changing colour. Curling and billowing across the viewers’ screens, the work will invite audiences to interact with the smoke, walking through or around it. Chicago conceived the scenography for the piece and chose the colours and sequencing to o er a unique experience of her smoke performances only possible in the virtual world.
The experience will be accompanied by a polyphonic soundtrack, realised in collaboration with sound designer Colin Bailey, which uses soundscapes made from recordings from Judy Chicago’s work with pyrotechnician Chris Souza, of Pyro Spectaculars. (from the press release)
Judy Chicago Rainbow AR
commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS), 2020, experience produced by International Magic
images: (cover 1) Judy Chicago – Purple Poem for Miami (2) Judy Chicago – Dry Ice Environment (3) Judy Chicago Rainbow AR, 2020. © Judy Chicago ®, Commissioned by LAS, Experience produced by International Magic (5) Judy Chicago – Portrait
