Guidebook for Mirror Worlds. Poetics of Transparency in Augmented Reality

• Main Author: Federico Biggio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2020-02-01
• Series: Body, Space & Technology Journal
• Subjects: semiotics; media studies; transparency; augmented reality
• Online Access: https://www.bstjournal.com/articles/333

It denotes the feature of an interface that is able to erase 'itself' (in the sense of ‘interface-less’), making the user experience more immediate. In augmented reality technologies, for instance, transparency is distinctive of an interface that simultaneously displays virtual elements and real perceptions enabling a increased perception toward other surreal worlds, and at the same time, it is a mirror technology, since it enables a fundamental subjective and embodied dimension of the mediatic experience. The aesthetic transparency of an augmented reality interface could denote a complete domestication of virtual objects (buttons, indicators, dynamic texts etc) directly in the field of view, but nonetheless it is possible to detect a cognitive transparency, by denoting the idea of a ‘metaphor that guides thinking and reveal the staging mechanism’ (Fuller 2017) going to focus on the perceptive and cognitive concession to the user as well on the opportunity to manipulate data directly and consistently, such are the applications in technics and medical field. Since they give access to this knowledge, these technological companies legitimise themselves and charged with value of accountability and social inclusion. The contribution will bring as references forms of augmented reality texts referable to hacktivist culture, understandable as a complainant operation through subversive practices, often produced by artist and hacktivist and aim to affirm a sort of ‘black transparency’. Nonetheless, augmented reality will be figured out as a technology for the emergence of virtual data from the physicality of reality, in terms of a situated knowledge, and this is the case of the cognitive transparency. The doubleness of technology – that correspond to a doubleness of applications, with the technological enhancement on one hand, and the technological scepticism about the other – will be related finally to the concept of mirror – as the apotheosis of opacity – trying to understand a cultural configuration of the transparency.