Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist who is creating the 4th Wall App AR platform that distributes inclusive, augmented reality art at site-specific, locations that are contested in some way. She launched Battlegrounds: New Orleans in December 2019, and it includes a number of AR art pieces from local artists who are commenting on the history and stories that have been overlooked or contested in some way.
Augmented reality art allows artists an expanded free speech zone of sorts to be able to overlay a volumetric contextualization of controversial locations, and hopefully creates what Cahill calls a “ghostly presence” that allows new narratives to be shared and new collective meaning to be created.
I previously talked to Cahill at the Games for Change Conference in June 2019, and she has launched in New Orleans since then. She’s taking an iterative approach of engaging local communities, and is still in the process of fundraising in order to more fully build out the 4th Wall App.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So continuing on in my series of looking at the VR for Good movement and some of the experiences from it, today's episode's with Nancy Baker-Cahill. She's an AR artist and activist and the founder of an app called the Fourth Wall app, which is trying to take these different locations around cities and starting off in New Orleans, picking different contested sites. And so she's collaborating with local artists to be able to create these immersive art pieces. that then are located around these different sites that are contested in some ways and tell a deeper story about what's happening in that community. So it's a public art project where she's really trying to be inclusive and encourage different ways of creative expression with different artists and to explore different aspects of resistance in these local communities. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of The Voices of VR Podcast. So this interview with Nancy happened on Friday, January 10th, 2020 at the Impact Reality Summit in Seattle, Washington. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:13.076] Nancy Baker Cahill: I'm Nancy Baker Cahill, and I'm an artist and an activist. I'm working with new media and in traditional media. I'm the founder and creative director of Fourth Wall, which is a free augmented reality public AR art app. And it is devoted to exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Great.
[00:01:32.774] Kent Bye: So I was wondering if you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into immersive technologies.
[00:01:38.840] Nancy Baker Cahill: Oh, okay, so I've always had sort of one foot in video and one foot in drawing, but the foot in drawing is a much bigger foot for very specific reasons, and I first got into drawing in VR for conceptual reasons, because I really wanted to put someone inside one of my drawings. I've always tried to elicit an empathic response in the viewer. I've always wanted to... All my work has been immersive, and when I look back, actually, at some of my videos and installations, I realize that I was trying to create a VR experience without any of the VR technology. So this has been, in some ways, an inexorable path. But it's sort of the type of thing where, when I started drawing in VR, I realized I'd sort of found my medium. But that medium, as you know and I know well, is not as accessible as other mediums. So I got interested in translating with my tech partners at Drive Studios, translating those VR experiences and drawings into AR so that they could be available to a wider audience. And that led to the founding of the app. And that's sort of like the beginning of the whole story.
[00:02:37.078] Kent Bye: Yeah, because I know the last time we chatted was in New York City at the XR for Change, and that you were showing some pieces there that you had done, which are these art pieces that you had done as part of an art installation, and that they were AR pieces, so they're site-specific. So I wasn't in the site when we saw it, but I was able to see it in VR. But also, we talked about the placement and the deeper context. And so since that time, you've launched the first location of Battlegrounds with the New Orleans. And so it's essentially this public art project where you have these artists being able to locate pieces of art around these different contested sites. So maybe you could elaborate a little bit of, now that this is launched, where are these pieces of art and maybe some of the deeper context and stories that you're trying to tell through augmented reality.
[00:03:22.362] Nancy Baker Cahill: Oh, I'm so excited to talk about this. So yes, so this has been a project that's been several months in the making, and it is born directly out of our moment of cultural civil war. And it struck me and a few of my collaborators that New Orleans really represented this unique starting point for conversation because of its own history. You know, it's very rich in culture, obviously, but it struggles acutely with these issues that I mentioned before. gentrification, poverty, robust petrochemical industry, and its own history of racial subjugation. So, and I knew that there was just a wealth of incredible talent and really rigorous talent, artistic talent in the city. And I was really fortunate enough to be connected, ironically, through people in Los Angeles to a few key people, curators and artists in New Orleans, who helped sort of really fanned out like a river delta, you know, recommending, this person recommended this person, And the question I posed to everyone was, look, I'm here to provide a vehicle. I'm here to provide this site-specific vehicle for you to exhibit, without any environmental harm, a piece of your art where it might have the most resonance at a contested site. What do you consider a site that is charged? that would offer the most opportunity for thoughtful discourse when paired with one of your artworks. And so it's really not at all about me or my agenda or even a curatorial. The main curatorial aim I had was to be as equitable and inclusive as possible, given certain metrics and standards for rigor. And the variety of places that people chose to put their works were Manifold. I mean, I'll just list a few and then I can tell you some of the stories associated with them, which were super intense. But we know polluted waterways, the Bonnacary spillway, which has a whole history I'll tell you about, former slave trade sites, Confederate statues, levees, prisons, gentrified neighborhoods, neglected neighborhoods, sites that were just look like there's nothing there at post-Katrina, but they were once sites for rich, rich, rich cultural centers and institutions that serve their communities and have never been rebuilt. So, and this is not the tourist, and we have a few in the French Quarter, there's one on the Bayou. This isn't the story of New Orleans that I think tourists would understand if they went there. This is a story told through the artist's eyes, through the artist's histories, and the artist's experiences, and of the people that they know. And it was really an opportunity for us to reveal and to illuminate and to animate stories, memories, and just even ideas that have been erased or ignored or misrepresented, people don't know about. And AR allows us to do that. AR allows us to say, you know, guess what? When you're standing on the corner of Chartreux and Esplanade, guess what this was? This is where they traded people. This is where they traded human beings. And the artist who did that piece, Ana Hernandez, it's called Slavery Time, and it's on our website. Everything, all the works are on our website, fourthwallapp.org. That was a direct call out to the people who are being held in pens right now. It was very important to her to not only acknowledge the history, but also acknowledge our present and what's going on elsewhere. It's very alive and well, what we're doing to people.
[00:06:37.127] Kent Bye: So the idea is that if people who either live in New Orleans are visiting, they could go to the fourth wall, see where they're at, and see a map of locations where they could go to a place that may be off the beaten path of where the normal tourists may be walking. And they can go to a place that is a location that has some history, that the contested aspect means that maybe it's just forgotten or not contextualize or people aren't acknowledging it or there's maybe statues and so you're trying to take stuff that is there and then to call back to the history that maybe has been erased.
[00:07:11.889] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yes, exactly. Well, built into the new app, the newest version of the app, is actually a button called Battlegrounds, which will link you to the Google map on our website, but we also had paper maps printed through paper machine in the Lower Ninth Ward. But yes, a contested site could be any number of those things. One of the first pieces that made me cry in AR was Dawn Dedeaux's piece that she put over the Superdome, and it was called Search and Rescue, and it featured this very irreverent, sassy, digital drawing of a frog called Acid Frog who is like a disco. He looks like he's covered in acid burns. But it also refers obviously to the boiling frog theory because this is a region of the country that is most vulnerable to climate change right now, right? I don't know how many football fields they're losing of their land every day to the rising waters. But anyway, And she put him, and he's farting these chemtrails. I mean, he's just a hot mess, this character. But she put him in a cape as a superhero and with a couple of his clones over the superdome. And she called it Search and Rescue, and it made me cry because I remembered what that felt like, that sense of gross impotence, you know, when Bush said, great job, Brownie, you know, and all the people are dying and suffering in this massive failure of FEMA and the government to help. So I mean that that is a very contested site because of course people on both sides that well there were all kinds of theories Around that but yes, so that is the opportunity of these types of sites Now when people see the art piece are they able to get an oral history story?
[00:08:41.034] Kent Bye: Or is it just the visuals or like there seems like there's a deep part of connecting the dots There's a piece of art But then do they have to read a block of text or how do you give the full experience of the context?
[00:08:52.559] Nancy Baker Cahill: This really remains the challenge. I mean in some cases there are soundtracks that accompany them. So some of the artworks have dedicated soundtracks to augment the art. But unfortunately all of that information is now on the website. I imagine a day when I could have either a volumetric capture of the artist themselves standing there giving some kind of history. Right now it's just all written down. I wish I had that. That's like funding. It always comes down to resources. Always, always, always. But if I had the resources, of course that's what I would do. Because, like for example, you wouldn't know necessarily that at the Bonnecary Spillway, which is actually just outside of New Orleans, it's between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, that was built on, by the Army Corps, over two sugar, former sugar plantations. And they knew that there were slave cemeteries there. And they did not exhume the bodies, they just built the spillway over them. So those cemeteries have been washed over time and time again. And the artist that put her piece there, Lily Brooks, that was really important to her to acknowledge that and to call it out. And she also, we did two pieces there. And as I said to you yesterday, there's nothing that beats standing on that soil and smelling the air and feeling the sun beating down on you and kind of imagining what it was like. But I wish I could tell that story. You wouldn't necessarily know that unless you went to the website and saw that that's what the context was. But my hope is that by going to these sites, you would at least be curious about why. And you would say, well, why are we being called? Why am I spending my time driving to the spillway that, by the way, also due to climate change, has been opened at least twice this year for the first time ever to release the Mississippi's been crazy high. So that remains a challenge. But every story is so rich in content that, you know, when I was in the Lower Ninth Ward with Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, the stories that they told us about the Holy Family Spiritual Church. We placed it over an empty lot where it once stood, pre-Katrina, and it was the core center of support for the neighborhood. There were a bunch of these, and they all had female reverends. All the leadership was female. But they were vilified by white churches as centers for black magic and voodoo. They weren't. they were as close as anybody got to health care in some cases, because they just didn't have the resources in those neighborhoods. And they're gone. And they're gone forever. And they weren't rebuilt. And so bringing back that memory, bringing back the reminder that this was an important part of that community, seems really important. And that was really important to the artists. And I learned so much history from the artists themselves, for whom this is really, really important.
[00:11:18.933] Kent Bye: Well, I know that I just had a chance to be in New Orleans, and we did a number of these different guided tours around different places, and it's got a very rich storytelling of live guided tours. But most of these tours are in a geographic location, where you're kind of walking around, you're going to the cemetery, you're going to a haunted tour in the French Quarter. But they would have to either go to the place, or potentially, I can imagine, future, where there would be enough of these contested sites that people would want to take a tour and maybe get a live story of that, of telling. People could see the pieces of art, but then get the deeper context of somebody telling these types of stories.
[00:11:57.920] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yes, and whether that's through the audio component, you know, we're at a funny moment right now because this really is still the most democratic delivery system possible, as flawed as it is. I mean, not every phone, obviously, is equipped with AR capability. But this is as close as we're going to get right now. And WebAR has its own whole host of issues, which we've discussed in terms of access and equity and all of that. But, yes, I mean, if I could somehow integrate that into the experience, I really would like to, because it's everything. That's the whole point. And it really makes the entire city, not even a museum, but it makes it a living public art exhibition that's ever-expanding. You know, 30 artworks is a lot of art. Those are a lot of contested sites. And 24 artists are a lot of artists, and we're adding more. So, and think about if we could do this in any number of cities, especially cities that aren't obvious, you know, but may have their own challenges, like Cleveland, for example, which is already underway, and, you know, places like Jacksonville, and places like Louisville, places like that, where, you know, not everybody is really thinking about it or paying attention, but there are incredible artists working in these cities, and they have a lot to say, and there's a lot to talk about, and we have to start talking about it, because our polarization, as we've discussed many, many times, there aren't a lot of points of intersection. So I feel that this is a way to kind of activate conversations that is not didactic, but is still provocative in the best way.
[00:13:23.271] Kent Bye: Yeah, we're here at the Impact Reality Summit and they gave a number of different pitches for people who are raising money for different projects. You gave a pitch for your project. And so one of the things that you talked about was this civic engagement component. So having local communities be able to come together and engage the community through this art. So to encourage this broader discussion, but to include the people in these local communities and by working with those local artists, So maybe could expand on that a little bit in terms of this civic engagement component of like how you see this Part of yes the arts out there, but if no one sees it and no one talks about it Then is it really making any shift or impact and so maybe could talk about this civic engagement component
[00:14:06.512] Nancy Baker Cahill: Civic engagement, public engagement is absolutely crucial. It's a pillar of the project and it has to be. Otherwise, you're right. It's like one hand clapping in the forest. Who cares? You have to make it accessible, relevant, and available to the people it serves, to the community it serves, and allow them into the conversation. Not even allow, invite them into the conversation. And so one of the workshops we did in the Lower Ninth Ward with some kids from L9 Center for the Arts was one of the best days I can remember in New Orleans. Working with kids, talking to them about what does sight mean to you? And we didn't really get into the contested side of it because I just really wanted to kind of ease into it. But we've talked about doing a Splinter Battlegrounds exhibition just for youth in New Orleans as well. But you know, what is a site that matters to you? What would be interesting to you and what would you put in that site? And one of the students, we went to the most dilapidated, this house that was falling apart. It was a tragically, it had gone through the hurricane, I don't think it had ever been fixed. It had since then been used for all kinds of other things and it was a mess. And she had this photograph of a light behind a parasol and the idea was that she wanted to bring light into this sort of dark space. And so we went and we took her piece and we placed it in AR in that somewhat perilous, I must say, edifice. And it was a beautiful thing to illustrate that and to have the kids see their work come alive in front of them, literally, and have them make that connection between, oh, this matters here because of this, you know? So I would love to do more of that kind of thing, too, and just kind of start getting people thinking about, especially in a world where we're encouraged to be inside, be interior, sit back, sit down, to get up, get out, and, like, be in the space, understand the history of a space, and then engage with it in some creative way.
[00:15:57.150] Kent Bye: And you're taking a very decentralized approach and decolonized approach where you're not going in there and you're not doing all the art and you're not trying to tell those stories and then go in there and leave. So maybe you could talk about your strategy of engaging the artists from the local communities and maybe the deeper context for why you think that's important.
[00:16:16.338] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, I mean, I sort of feel like, what's the point if you're not going to get to know people? I mean, the friendships that I've made actually, even just through the, I think I've been to New Orleans six times this year, and the friendships I've made there have only deepened. And I felt embraced and accepted by the community. And I hope it's because I didn't come in with some, like, you know, here I am to save you from... No, I mean, I hope I came in with humility and curiosity, which I think are key to any conversation and to having any kind of productive conversation within any community. But that's how I hope to approach all of these projects, you know. I'm a sort of expanding universe person, so I love meeting new people and hearing new stories and expanding my own social universe all the time. And, yeah, that's never been my goal. I am suspicious of that and I imagine most other people are too. I think you have to just go in saying, look, I want to be part of a conversation. I want to initiate a conversation and then let you run with it and however I can help facilitate it because I am privileged to have this tool. and this vehicle and this platform. And as long as I have this tool and vehicle and platform that I can use for good, I'm going to do it. And I'm going to share it and collaborate. Because to me, those are the most interesting conversations. It is, believe me, incredibly uninteresting as a singular person. It is much more interesting to me to share these extraordinary stories with a broader audience.
[00:17:44.491] Kent Bye: What's been some of the feedback or the reactions that you've had to it so far?
[00:17:48.205] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, we just, I was so gratified. Somebody just posted on Instagram that they had gone and done the tour and that they found it incredibly moving and powerful and it was just, that made me feel great because, I mean, you lose objectivity and I feel so moved. I mean, the piece by Nick Aziz outside the Orleans Parish Prison, when we placed that piece, I had no idea he taught kids inside, and maybe he also teaches adults inside the prison. And he couldn't wait to show them what was outside. This is a, to describe it, it's a, I would call it a contemporary still life. It was a confederate flag with a big bucket of fried chicken and a bunch of guns, and it was called Finger Clickin' Good, and he'd done this exhaustive research about the relationship between the titans of the prison industrial complex and the fast food industry. And he, believe me, I've got all the writing on that. But I just, I was so moved by that, you know? So the fact that other people were moved by it, by Ron Theron's piece on the train tracks called Never the Twain Shall Meet, it's these two, he's an incredible sculptor, these two figures, and it just has a, it's directly on the train tracks and you just hear the train bell tolling, tolling, tolling, and it's about racial relations. And one has a white head and the other has a black. I mean, like I said, to me, content is king. Content is everything. This is the whole reason to do it. It's about ideas. And so if people, as they seem to be moved by it, there are always going to be technical glitches. You know, GPS is a notoriously fickle, you know, it jumps around. For Don's piece, for the frog, it works great. Jumps on top of the Confederate statue. It's always jumping around. It's like doing its disco. It has like a warped disco soundtrack, which I love. But, you know, so things bounce around sometimes. My feeling is, That's all part of it. I could take the time to anchor everything perfectly. But first of all, I don't have the resources to do it, one. But two, I love how nimble we can be. We can pull it up, put it down, move it around. I don't know. I think it has a lot of potential.
[00:19:41.797] Kent Bye: And it sounds like you're expanding out to other cities as well. And so maybe you could just talk about your strategy for how to start to cultivate these different connections across these variety of different cities across the United States to be able to start to scale this out.
[00:19:55.716] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, it's certainly in the case of, I mentioned Los Angeles. Actually, the Los Angeles project involves two of the New Orleans artists, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, who had, unbeknownst to me, been documenting South LA for quite a long time, which is itself undergoing a huge gentrification issue. And that's the conversation we're in right now with LACMA. Jesse is involved in that as well. In Cleveland, I have a friend in Cleveland that I've done work with in Slavic Village. She's curated me into projects there, immersive projects there, and she's a filmmaker herself. She mentioned Battlegrounds to one of her colleagues at the Cleveland Sculpture Center, and they immediately jumped on it and said, well, we want to do this here in Cleveland, and I know that Ryan can curate. Ryan knows that city. She's lived there forever. She knows all the artists. She knows those battlegrounds. She can do that. That is something she can handle. And the Sculpture Center is really behind it and has all kinds of ambitious projects. So it's kind of about partnering with the right people and having the right people find out about it. You know, Jacksonville, Jesse has familial ties there. Louisville, I have familial ties. Part of the research was brought us to St. Louis. There's a lot going on in St. Louis. Obviously, Ferguson is there. So it's sort of connecting with people who can then, again, connect you with other people. It's this beautiful sort of connective tissue and collaborative tissue that occurs when you have just, you know, one person in any of these places.
[00:21:13.821] Kent Bye: So for you, what type of experiences do you want to have in immersive technologies?
[00:21:18.988] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well I mean I have my own practice and I make my own, I draw everything in VR first and then I make these very sort of ambitious AR activations and drawings that are animated that are all site-specific and conceptual. So obviously I'm really excited to continue to do that but also to push the boundaries of what's possible, not only there, but not only out in the world, but also in more fixed settings. I've been doing a little more of that lately. But as far as the sort of public practice piece and the branch of the practice that's really involved in spreading and sharing and collaborating with other people around these topics, that feels to me urgently like something I need to do as a citizen right now. and as an activist, and as, again, someone who wants to use the tech subversively, wants to use the tech for good, and use it to spread ideas, and to share ideas, and to spark ideas, versus the opposite, which is what I feel we're getting from all other sources, which is propaganda and a lot of visual junk, and spectacle.
[00:22:17.137] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies and immersive art might be, and what that might be able to enable?
[00:22:26.933] Nancy Baker Cahill: Again, that's such a big question, but I think it's where we're headed. If we don't want to make an environmental impact, and this part is really important, it's a way for us to consume and produce content responsibly. And I think that, you know, we can't even get to the whole conversation about 5G because that's a whole other thing, but I think that it really does, if you focus on content, And if you move someone, if you make them think they will remember it, it will be like a ghost in their head when they pass that place, that site, or the space, wherever they experienced it. I think the danger is, again, what I said, spectacle, where it's just fluff, candy, things that are just easy to consume and discard. But I think the potential is in rigorous attention to ideas and refusing to ever settle for kind of what we're given. and accept what we're given, but to take what we have and use it toward these subversive ends. I think that's, for me, that's the ultimate potential. That's what I'm interested in. I'm sure other people are interested in other things, but I would like people to have an embodied experience. I'd like people to have an experience in their hearts, their souls, in their minds, obviously, that would somehow either prompt them to action or at least to Shake their opinion, maybe even a little bit. Alter it a little bit. Just any kind of change. Prompt any kind of change.
[00:23:57.111] Kent Bye: Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:24:01.658] Nancy Baker Cahill: Just that to the immersive community, I'm just so happy to be a part of it. I think it's a very, I will say this about it, I've said this before, I think it's an unusually generous and open, at least for now, while it remains small-ish, it's not nearly as, well I won't name other communities that are less generous and open, but suffice to say I feel honored to be a part of it.
[00:24:27.167] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, congratulations on the launch. And I hope that you're able to have this decentralized public art movement around the world, starting maybe here in the United States, but all over, and collaborating with curators. And it's just exciting to see what the potential is to be able to get people to go to different locations that are contested and start to make art about it, and to tell these stories that maybe haven't been more broadly told or known. So thank you.
[00:24:51.688] Nancy Baker Cahill: Thank you so much, Kent. Always a pleasure.
[00:24:54.390] Kent Bye: So that was Nancy Baker Cahill. She's a AR artist and activist and the founder and creative director of the Fourth Wall app. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, this conversation happened after the pitch session that happened at the Impact Reality Summit, where there was about a dozen different creators who were giving their pitches to the wider community there at the Impact Reality Summit, a number of different funders in the audience, lots of other creators. And I think the thing that stuck out to me in Nancy's pitch was that she's taking a very iterative approach. You know, a lot of different projects that were there are still being funded. None of the stuff has been created yet, but her approach is that she's trying to actually do these fast iterations and get this project out there. So it's actually like launches an app already. She's already collaborating with these different artists and putting out there. There's a lot of things that I think could be used to expand the app, but that's part of the reason why she needs to raise more money and to get more support, to be able to. actually expand it out to the full vision. But at least at this point, you can start to have people who happen to be in New Orleans and start to go around to these different locations and to explore these different pieces of art. So there's a number of different things that I find interesting about Nancy's approach. One is that iterative approach where she's just, you know, moving fast and getting it out there. It creates this dynamic. As a journalist covering this space, I can start to actually talk about it because, you know, it's something that's already been launched. It's easier to talk about something once it's out in the field and has some people experiencing it and it's launched publicly. And she's trying to build this momentum around it to get more support. the other thing is that you know she's collaborating with these artists and so she's either collaborating with artists who are familiar with different artists in the scene or curators who are familiar with different artists who are doing specific things and going to these places that are a little bit off the beaten path i mean these contested sites aren't necessarily always in within a very easily accessible place of like the french quarter or something like that you know these tourist areas where my trip to New Orleans recently, you know, staying in the French Quarter and traveling around these different locations. But in order to take this tour, I would have, we would have had like to get a car and to kind of travel around, or I think it takes a bit logistically to get around. It's not easy if you're kind of just dropping in. But if you already live in New Orleans, or if you have access of being able to kind of get around to these different locations, then You can start to see the piece of art and imagine that in the future that you'll want to be able to hear in the moment a little bit more context of the story. You know, like when you see a piece of art, you can read the plaque to get a little bit more of the context. And there's a little bit of that that's already within the app, but going into the website to get more context. Talk to other people like Duncan Speakman who's done a lot of these like audio walks and so what it would look like to plan out a specific route and then to see about how much time on average it takes to get between place and place and are there ways to Fill in the gaps with audio or these other oral histories or in this case, you know she was saying it'd be great to be able to have a volumetric capture on-site to be able to show the deeper story and That's one option, but I think, you know, another option could be thinking about the time in between actually showing up the art. Like, do you have something that you listen to before you see the piece of art? Do you have stuff to listen to after you see the piece of art? And, you know, is there kind of a best practice for how to really onboard and off-board people onto a piece of art like this? Because, you know, as you go into a piece of art, then, you know, that onboarding and off-boarding into these magic circles is a big part of like setting a deeper context of these things. I think, you know, maybe sometimes with these pieces of art, it's pretty clear, but you can start to unpack and really dig into the meaning a little bit more. So this is already out there and available. So people who live in New Orleans, they can go through these different locations and to see these different pieces of art. Like I said, there's a little bit of like trying to piece together to get the deeper context, but You know, Nancy's in the process of trying to raise funds and raise money to be able to support really fully building this out. So when they were talking about the impact reality summit, they were talking about like, what are the things that could really make a huge impact? I actually think that this concept, this idea of being able to very quickly deploy out, you know, it's just essentially getting the GPS coordinates and then, you know, setting the piece of immersive art, you know, in my previous conversation that I had with Nancy back in episode 783, where we dig into a lot of her process. She goes into this process of talking about putting this piece of art onto the Supreme Court and having to get someone from Craigslist to help set it. And somebody who wanted to make a change and make an impact and help go through all the different steps that they needed to actually set these pieces of art. But this is just something that lots of people have phones, lots of people have the ability to be able to download these different apps and to have these different augmented reality experiences. And to be able to start to recontextualize different aspects of these places around town that The thing that Nancy said is that she wants to try to invoke the sense of these ghostly presence of like, when you walk by these places in the future, that you remember that piece of art and you remember these deeper stories. And I think that's the, I think a really powerful way to use augmented reality, especially since, you know, it's a, it's a medium where a lot of phones have it and just start to really push forward. What's possible to play with the medium in that way, in a way that she says it's a very subversive way and her artist and activist temperaments. And I think having a broader plan around the civic engagement and public engagement, having people go through in groups, or if there's a docent or people who have learned the different aspects of the stories, I think that's a whole other option. There's a whole lot of different tours that are happening in New Orleans, and it could be in the future you start to have these guided tours, have these augmented reality supplements to be able to help elucidate these different stories and to maybe start to show these different locations that maybe have a history that's hidden a little bit more. and to really bring it to life by having someone take you to these different places and be able to tell the full story. Anyway, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for joining me here on the Voices of VR podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicethevr. Thanks for listening.
