Mark Skwarek: AR Intervention

Mark Skwarek: AR Intervention 
OPENING ON: FRIDAY, March 1ST 7:00 - 11:00PM. 
ON VIEW UNTIL March 25TH, 2013.

Mark Skwarek showcases a series of recent augmented reality interventions created across the globe. These confrontational, politically charged works are created by the artist and his community. Skwarek acts as instigator and organizer for the community at large and several of the pieces feature an array of contributors joining arms in a virtual protest. For this exhibition, Skwarek will release a new work in the form of an App, createAR, that lets the public create Augmented Reality objects of their choosing at any location.

From the 1st augmented reality in North Korea to the theft of the British Museum's Parthenon Marbles the work will test the meaning of public and private space in digital age. Augmented reality gives artists the ability to create without many limitations and the AR Intervention show points to this future.

Special Events

Saturday March 9th 2013, 7pm to 10pm
Artist Mark Skwarek will brave an augmented reality flood which has spread across WIlliamsburg in a homemade boat. Audience members will have the opportunity to participate with mobile devices.

Mark Skwarek is a new media artist working to bridge the gap between virtual reality and the real world by using augmented reality. He is a founding member of the artist augmented reality group manifest.AR. Skwarek earned his M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design's Digital Media Department. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at New York University Polytech where he is full time faculty. Reviews of his artwork have appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Boing Boing, WIRED, the Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, NPR, BBC, the art blog and Leonardo. Skwarek has exhibited in various venues, including: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; ISEA; Dumbo Arts Festival; UCLA Digital Grad Gallery; Devotion Gallery, the CyberArts Festival; the Sunshine International Art Museum, Beijing; and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, the Zero1 Biennial and the Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center. Upcoming shows include FACT in Liverpool England, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

gradually melt the sky a curatorial project by Mark Skwarek + Will Pappenheimer

gradually melt the sky
a curatorial project by Mark Skwarek + Will Pappenheimer
Augmented Reality tour of works in the show Sat 4/30 at PACE GALLERY at 12:30 sharp- see the parade to hope in action!
Devotion closed for 4/30. Go to the parade instead!
April 8th – May 1, 2011
Opening: Friday, April 8, 7pm – 10pm.
Opening night live performances by Jeremy Bailey and Mark Skwarek at approximately 8pm.


The title of this exhibition takes its cue from the 1964 artwork-poem “Tunafish Sandwich” by Yoko Ono. The text imagines a performance event which is at once cosmic and mundane, an action painting and a protest. The artworks in this exhibition employ a recent developing technology dubbed “augmented reality” to overlay, intervene and challenge the physical world in much the same conjectural spirit as preceding Fluxus and Conceptual works.

As the influence of the virtual expands, integrates and maps itself across the material, strange objects, banal byproducts, ghost imagery and radical events appear in our homes and spatially across the landscape. Closed social systems lodged in physical hierarchies are layered, then pried open by popup media available to armies of networked creatives. AR, as this technology is abbreviated, invites artists and viewers to consider coexistent spacial realities in which anything is possible anywhere. Subliminal, aesthetic and political suggestions play themselves out as techno-disturbances in a substratasphere of online and offline experience. The cell phone or the CRT, are immaterial witness to these ephemeral dimensional objects and relational post-sculptural events. The fact that this current technology is primitive, amplifies its potency, with the extra possibility of actualization tacked on to the conceptual gesture.
Will Pappenheimer, Jan 14, 2011

Artists participating:
eteam, Jeremy Bailey, Kristin Lucas, Sander Veenhof, Tamiko Thiel, LoVid, Christopher Manzione, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Lily Honglei, Will Pappenheimer, Virta-Flaneurazine, 4 Gentleman, John Cleater, John Craig Freeman, Mark Skwarek, Phoenix Perry, Patrick Lichty, Alan Sondheim, Damon Baker, Arthur Peters

Opening night live performances by Jeremy Bailey and Mark Skwarek at approximately 8pm.

Weekly excursion performance tours to augmented reality sites in Chelsea, Newtown Creek, Greenwich Village and Union Square. Info, times and itineraries to be published on the two websites below:
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