AR Work of Art

Most virtual art asks you to look at it. This asks whether the audience can hold the pen: a 360° mixed-reality rhythm game where hitting blocks fires particle effects into the room and missing them lets those effects fade, with three audio tracks layering in as you sustain it.

The one decision worth keeping is that failure subtracts instead of punishing. Missing a block does not deduct points or end a run — it dims the particles and lowers the music. There is no scoreboard, because the state of the artwork is the readout: if it is dark and quiet, that describes your performance rather than judging it. A score would have made the art a container for a game; making the art the readout means a player cannot help authoring it.

It came out of a podcast interview with Nancy Baker Cahill about siting AR work in contested places in New Orleans, which is where I am from — the same Cahill who turns up two years later as one of four precedents in my thesis. My verdict at the time was that it did not fully meet my expectations, and I still think the particle system carries more of it than the interaction does.