AUGMENT_EARTH
An Immersive Virtual Experience
Augment Earth is a mixed reality experience firmly situating Indigenous perspectives, histories, and futures into Chicago’s urban landscape.
These narratives live in a digital and physical landscape. Each story is geo-located, tied to a physical anchor, or marker, that is a specific place or object. Stories/ places/ objects are in orbit, aligned around time and space as you walk through the city.
Using a smartphone and geolocation, visitors encounter an interactive digital gallery of artistic works illuminating Native histories, culture, language and future-oriented narratives that are augmented over Indigenous points of interest throughout Chicago and beyond.
Augment Earth advances the field of immersive digital experiences by expanding the vocabulary of artistic media for public art. The work pays homage to the transportation crossroads of the Great Lakes and Mississippi waterways used by residents for thousands of years. The combination of physical sites with virtual worlds opens new possibilities for accessible, evolving, and interactive learning and community-building in the creative arts.