Really Fake or Faking Reality? The Riot Grrrls Project

Abstract

This chapter traces the evolution of the Riot Grrls App, a proposition applying the inherent possibilities of image-based augmented technology to an historical exhibition of paintings by the Riot Grrrls, a 1990s feminist punk movement, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The intention was to exploit the structural necessities of augmented reality, by conceptually and visually layering related references in real time, to both poetic and pedagogical ends. To do this, a School of the Art Institute professor and an art historian with expertise in user-experience worked as a team to lead a School of the Art Institute class of young students to create augmented art works using the historic paintings as both augmented triggers but also artistic material. They created inventive formal solutions that engaged museum goers intellectually and esthetically and were intentionally open-ended.