Shared Privacy and Public Intimacy: The Hybrid Spaces of Augmented Reality Art

Can we speak about a specific real-virtual spatiality in the contexts offered by the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice? Does Augmented Reality have the potential to produce a different type of space (essentially hybrid) in which private and public converge up to the point of their cross identification? More exactly, to create, what media theoretician Jenny Edbauer Rice names a "zone of public intimacy"(1)? The goal of this essay is to explore the possible answers to these questions. At the core of my analysis is the idea that the hybrid character of Augmented Reality is effected by two conditions. On the one hand, by the process of converging real and virtual spaces into a single although discontinuous "multimedia" space-image and, on the other, by the tensions existent between private perception and public engagement (with the setting, with the information and with other users). My conclusion is that by creating a hybrid convergent space of inclusions and exchanges, AR raises not only the prospect of a new sensorium (an expanded corporeality), but, what is more, it confirms the possibility of a distinct aesthetic paradigm as well as of a different way to articulate social relations.