Bio
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes is a writer, artist, and film maker. He works across disciplines to create, for viewers and users, experiences which challenge the borders between the real and the virtual, the cinematic and the actual, fine art and popular experience. His work is a convolvement of feature films, gallery video art, photographic and new media applications; they have in common a sense of play in apparatus and traditional structures: actual subjects performing roles, transparent media machinations serving as 'stage', collisions of one medium with another. His feature films, media installations, and augmented reality publications have been prestigiously screened, exhibited, and published internationally. He is currently a member of the full-time faculty in the Department of Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Title
"Augmented Reality and the Posthuman: An (AR) Allegory of the (VR) Cave"
Abstract
There has been a certain romantic disappointment to the end of the broadcast era. Given the means of mediation-production and two-way distribution, society has not simply become unshackled from its Platonic cave chains to traipse in the democratic real but have delved deeper into mediation, screens, self-branding, avatars, and the co-mingling of virtual and real. In image reading and creation, this movement has two vectors: a realization of abstract virtuals, as Vilém Flusser describes, in which we are able to forget History in favor of programming and designing its images through data visualization, or alternately a new age of mediation in which the medium is an actor and we encounter images, including images of ourselves, in a mechanical juxtaposition in which images are selected and metonymically contextualized by agents that are not human... that is, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
