Future Arts Interview: Recontextualizing "Nature as Queen" in a New Media World - REDEFINE magazine - music art film journalism

In the recent past, the term “new media” has grown to encompass artists who work in any sort of digital medium. Under that blanket term, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been gaining traction in many techno-social spheres. Future Arts — a Seattle-based women and nonbinary-led nonprofit founded in early 2021 by artists Yuliya Bruk, Anna Czoski, and Laara Garcia — actively keeps a pulse on emerging digital storytellers, with the hope of facilitating spaces that will connect those in the booming tech industry to the city’s artists.

In “currents” by Alina Nazmeeva and Alex Kosnett, augmented reality is used to superimpose a holographic salmon run in place of a construction site where a new high-rise will emerge in the coming months. (Credit: Yabsira Wolde)

For three weeks at the end of August 2022, Future Arts hosted their first outdoor showcase, AUGMENT Seattle, in the tech-centered South Lake Union neighborhood. The result was a stunning display of the scale and range that AR has to offer as an arts medium. With a total of nine immersive art engagements created by 17 local and international artists, AUGMENT “rewilded” concrete buildings with 3-dimensional imagery of Indigenous and non-native plants, schools of salmon gliding on wind currents, and abstract, glitched-out bodies strutting invisible runways.

“There really is a breadth of ways that [AR] could interact with the environment,” says Bruk, a new media artist who had almost a decade of experience at Amazon, and Future Arts’ only full-time staff member. “We want to keep people rooted in this world, and AR does that.”

REDEFINE writers Vee Hua (L) and Katharina Brinschwitz on a press ARTour of the AUGMENT exhibit, featuring “#GlitchGoddess” by Marjan Moghaddam in the foreground. (Credit: Anna Czoski)