Meditation #1: Electronic Conjuring

I’ve been cultivating an electronic ritual in 2020, and practicing it zealously without recognizing the degree of spell-craft that truly characterizes this new ability. Whether at home or on the go, if my phone is in my grip I feel a curious tug at my thumbs that directs me to “body forth” characters, creatures, and portals to magic other worlds that only I can see. Strangers stare in bewilderment as they see me gyrating for better perspectives, squinting through my magic lens. But the woman beside me on a bench waiting for the subway doesn’t notice the mysterious mustachioed man in the hat and trench coat sitting between us. Sometimes I send him down onto the tracks. He doesn’t mind.

Now I’ll dispel of the mystery and reveal that I am of course referring to augmented reality. There’s nothing quite so fun, so enchanting, as this new ability to summon tridimensional virtual beings and objects in real time, wherever I go, whenever I go. I have developed a small army of animated rigged Fuse characters at my beck and call for fast prototyping. I didn’t expect the extent to which this new ritual would begin to renegotiate my relationship to space, solitude, and storytelling.

My earliest memories of electronic rituals involved my family gathering in a secluded library of our wooded suburban home for early point & click adventures. One of these was titled “The 7th Guest”, and my lifelong fascination with haunted houses and ghost stories was born in the countless nightmares inspired by that terrifying experience. Weekly gatherings of the Midnight Society on Snick helped to advance my curiosity in dark storytelling rituals, and this passion is still what drives my creative ambitions in the space of emerging technology today. I’ve come to the revelation that there is no better augmentation to a space than a haunting, and what is a haunting at all if not a good story? A place that is haunted is one that is occupied by a time-space where parallel narratives can live concurrently in spatial memory. My phone screen is a haunted mirror through which I can observe the ghosts of my imagining onto the spaces they might already inhabit.

I used to roll my eyes at the sight of gleeful tribes of Pokemon Go players on the hunt in Prospect Park. I tend to roll my eyes at Prospect Park in general because I’ve become so jaded after so many years, but I’ve taken to ritual quests in the park seeking places to conjure beasts, monsters, and giants.

Beyond my Prospect Park questing, there is a drawer in the coffee table where I sit in my living room that I recently cleared out and now keep empty. I’ve consecrated this space within my antique wooden furniture for conjuring. I’ve been doing this almost daily, and it’s one of the first places I go to playtest a new 3D model or asset I’m working with. I’ve come to think of it as my own “Indian in the Cupboard” type of enchantment, and something about containing the action to the confines of this tiny space is thrilling when I consider the possibilities of world building and storytelling in hidden places.

This blog post features video clips shot in Adobe Aero and ARLOOPA