Brian Slattery Photos
Giant birds in flight. Trees swaying in a light breeze. A child dancing in a dinosaur costume. A fading mural restored. They’re part of Here’s Another Story, a project that uses a virtual-reality phone app to allow people to walk the streets of Ninth Square and, through their phone screens, watch the public art there bloom into festive, fun, and meaningful animation.
Here’s Another Story, from artist Marc Pettersen, is part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas as it swings into its second year of Covid-19-era programming with a mix of outdoor and virtual events. Pettersen’s project is, in a sense, a combination of both.
“I’m always looking at new types of art and technology and seeing how it can work it together,” said Pettersen, a digital artist who works with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). He went to school for traditional, hand-drawn animation and has moved steadily into computer and VR animation ever since. He’s now a youth mentor at YOUmedia, a maker space at the Hartford Public Library, where he teaches students how to use VR, AR and 3D printing.
As his starting point, Pettersen used the existing public art in Ninth Square — much of it created just this year during the pandemic. Pettersen created his pieces using a VR headset and hand controllers, which allowed him to create, manipulate, and augment the images in the murals in front of him. Virtual reality and the creative tools used to work in it, he said, are inching ever closer to being fully immersive. “If I made a virtual sculpture, I could walk all the way around it.”
Participants in a small tour group met on the corner of Orange and Crown Streets on Saturday afternoon to experience Pettersen’s project. To see the virtual art, we first downloaded an app — Eyejack — to our phones. Then we downloaded Pettersen’s project, AR New Haven, by scanning or clicking a QR code. (Full instructions are available here.) All this took maybe a minute or two. With the app running and the content downloaded, we could point our phones at the murals to see the animation. The app also gave us the chance to take pictures or videos.
We stopped first at artist David De La Mano’s mural paying tribute to Black entrepreneur William Lanson. Pettersen had learned about De La Mano’s intentions for the mural, the bars represented the obstacles Lanson had to overcome, while the birds and their riders represented how Lanson’s successes lifted up his community and paved the way for others. In his animations, Pettersen brought De La Mano’s intentions to life. To the strains of Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life,” first the bars fell across a gray backdrop; then the flock and birds and riders swooped in from the right, hurtling through the air toward a better future.
Turning and walking maybe 20 yards down Crown Street toward State Street, we gathered around a mural by the artist Swoon, next to the entrance to Cafe Nine. Pettersen explained that Swoon had painted the mural in 2014 with wheat paste, so “it’s meant to degrade and go away.” His animation employed the simple trick of superimposing an image of the piece when it was first painted over the mural in its current form — effectively turning back time and letting viewers see the details of the original while also allowing the mural to degrade as it was designed to do. Virtual reality technology didn’t always need to enhance; it could also preserve.
The group next walked down Crown Street, up Orange, and to Center Street, where Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran’s mural spread across the southern wall of the street. For this mural, Pettersen had opted to make certain elements of the mural three-dimensional, so that, taking pictures or a video with one’s phone, a subject could interact with the mural, moving within it rather than simply in front of it.
This is where Pettersen revealed that his project was still a work in progress, and solicited ideas from the group for what he might animate next — say, the musical notes coming from the violin player.
This stop drew enough passersby to swell the tour group from about six to around 10, as curious people peered at other people’s phones or dowloaded the app to try it themselves. At one point a pedestrian walked into the frame and only then noticed everyone pointing their phones at him and the mural behind him.
“Oh! Sorry,” he said.
“No, that’s OK,” a participant said. “You were part of the art.”
Walking back to Crown Street, the tour stopped in front of the facade of the building that houses Artspace. Here Pettersen had created a much more elaborate animation. Set to a song by the New Haven-based band Olive Tiger, the piece involves a small cartoon boy in a dinosaur suit who first sashays along the sidewalk, then hops into the street to continue dancing. Opportunities to interact with this character — Pettersen said that it was based on “my youthful, creative kid” — abounded.
Pettersen said he’s planning not only to build out some of the existing animations further, but to possibly add more pieces involving some of the other public art in Ninth Square. This will also allow him to see how far he can push the existing technology, which is rapidly improving, the possibilities continuing to expand.
“There is so much going on with VR,” he said. He mentioned a project Facebook is working on with Ray-Ban to create sunglasses that also work as VR goggles. It’s easy to see how this technology could be both useful (say, walking directions in real-time, reviews of restaurants that pop up as you pass by) and intrusive (virtual billboards of ads everywhere). “That’s the thing with anything” related to technology, Pettersen said. “New technology is great, but it can be taken to places it shouldn’t.”
Pettersen’s own use of the technology, however, served very much to amplify what was already there. His project first gave New Haveners a reason to revisit the proliferation of public art that has made Ninth Square a more colorful place. He placed himself in conversation with those pieces and brought out their messages more. And as Pettersen’s animations made the public art move, so walking from piece to piece let us see that Ninth Square itself — so static in the depths of the pandemic — was becoming more animated. People were walking the streets more. They were using the seating at the closed end of Orange Street to grab a little lunch, or socialize. By hitting the pavement, we were a part of the neighborhood’s reawakening, helping bring it back to life.
The International Festival of Arts and Ideas runs now through June 27. Visit its website for a full schedule of events.
Really neat idea, but I really hope it's not used for commercializing and digital pop up ads or other intrusive means or privacy invading means. We need to ask ethical questions about technology and it's reach into our lives. It can be used for good or bad, but at its worst it is used to monetize humans and their lives.