Alicja Kwade

AR-BEIT (2020) | Augmented Reality

In the Autumn 2020, Acute Art produced AR-BEIT, a new augmented reality project in collaboration with Alicja Kwade. 

Free to download via the Acute Art app, this series consists of four individual sculptures, in reference to works from the artist’s oeuvre, developed within this new medium. Unlike their physical counterparts, users are able to touch, interact with and virtually place the works in and outdoors allowing users to engage with Kwade’s works within a new dimension.

Kreisel (Inception) (AR)

Inspired by The Interpretation of Dreams written by Sigmund Freud in 1899, Kreisel (Inception) (AR) emulates the small silvery spinning top seen in the last frame of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film of the same name. Within the film, the spinning top is used to determine whether they are really ‘awake’ as the characters find themselves trapped in a dream within a dream. However, in Kwade’s work, the spinning top constantly spins, trapping her audience within the dream.

Angst (AR)

Referring to the popular proverb, ‘to bury one’s head in the sand’, Angst (AR), an anthropomorphised Kaiser-Idell lamp sticks its head into the ground when the user walks towards it. The sculpture’s curious mannerisms forces an emphatic reaction from the user.

All at Any Time (AR) 

In All at Any Time (AR), users are able to drag hypothetical forms of the universe across the screen so they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, referring to the idea of interacting parallel universes.

MarsMelone (AR)              

MarsMelone (AR) looks initially like a common watermelon, but on closer inspection, users will notice its stripes run horizontally instead of vertically, emulating the outer surface of mars. Much like the planet itself, the work hovers in space. Users are also able to rotate the object by tapping on it.

LinienLand (2019) | Augmented Reality

Produced in collaboration with Acute Art, this immersive work consists of a gridded architecture approximately 36 feet in height, in which massive spheres rotate like planets in orbit. Alicia Kwade considers the structure as a possible multiverse in which each quadrant represents a parallel world within a mathematical, human-made linear system.

Kwade’s AR sculpture presents the first immaterial development of the artist’s ongoing project LinienLand. This iteration moves the project towards a new perceptual experience of art in an increasingly information-based world.

While the digital work is formally related to Kwade’s real-life sculptural installations such as LinienLand (2018) and ParaPivot (2019), the sense of wonderment engendered by the IRL works is displaced onto the illusionism afforded by AR technology and introduces motion as an additional element of the work. Viewed through an app, the work appears to be a substantial structure, but is in fact pure information rendered through complex sets of digital data.