A Porcelain Dish Embellished by
Augmented Reality Projections
Nue Morte is a porcelain dish on which one can view a naked sleeping odalisque, through a smart phone by using custom augmented-reality software. This sleeping figure tosses and turns, apparently lying across one's meal. Artificially intelligent insects crawl in endlessly mutating patterns over both the illusory figure and your solid, "reality" food.
The technology behind the Nue Morte is a special augmented-reality app for droid tablets, designed by the artist, created to accompany the limited edition plate-set. Once launched, and the device camera is directed towards the plate, the app recognizes a decorative pattern inscribed on the elegant bone china and displays a custom-authored video projection that seems to be a part of your meal. This app is specifically designed to work with the custom Nue Morte plate-set.
Nue Morte imagery is enigmatic and dream-like, adopting the cinematic style of early twentieth-century Surrealist photography and experimental film. The inspiration for Nue Morte was Chien Andalou, the 1929 film by Luis Bunuel and Meshes of the Afternoon, the 1943 experimental film by Maya Deren. My approach to the custom app is to locate it within the media histories of avant-garde photography, film and video just as experimental artists have always worked with new technologies from their initiation, beginning with the development of photography in the late nineteenth century. With the Nue Morte, I draw on the visual style and psychological subject matter of early technologies, from those you see in early Surrealist photography and film, as well as those found in even more media "archeological" technologies such as the peep-hole camera and the Zoetrope.
With the Nue Morte porcelain dish, an erotic transgressive layer of imagery floats in an illusory space across your supper. And just as our dreams arise from the unconscious, augmented projections manifest in an illusory liminal space... the puerile truth behind the sophisticated bourgeois world of interior decoration and design.