The Collaborative Composite Image, The MAG Project

Rochester Institute of Technology Professors Susan Lakin (School of Photographic Arts and Sciences) and David Halbstein (3D Digital Graphics department of the School of Design), developed an interdisciplinary course to explore the technical and aesthetic ramifications of collaborative image-making among multiple disciplines. The final project in this course utilized Aurasma, an augmented reality platform for mobile devices. Our demonstration will give the participants a hands-on opportunity to experience the student projects.

Teams of students from divergent disciplines choose paintings from a local Rochester art museum to create an augmented reality experience. For this demonstration, we will use high quality reproduction prints of the paintings from the Memorial Art Gallery available to act as triggers to connect with the digital animations. We will direct the audience to download our course app, "The Collaborative Composite Image" (a skinned Aurasma app), on their mobile devices and view the projects based on various paintings from artists such as Claude Monet, Rachel Ruysch, and Maxfield Parrish. They will delve into a Jonas Lie painting, moving through the landscape with the morning sounds of the river, take a step out of a Thomas Hart Benton painting to imagine the artist’s source of inspiration, or watch the Young Priestess in a William Adolphe Bouguereau painting transport into space. Ten unique interpretations of paintings will be available for this augmented reality experience. For those who do not own a mobile device or who prefer not to install new applications, there will be some on hand for public use.

If time permits, we will deconstruct one or two of the projects to demonstrate the creative and technical processes the students used to animate their paintings. We will address the use of the augmented reality platform, Aursama, and how we applied it to the project.

Susan Lakin
David Halbstein
Rochester Institue Of Technology