LAS Art Foundation

Judy Chicago
Rainbow AR

Launch: 10 Nov 2020

Online Experience

Judy Chicago continues her long-running Atmospheres series, inviting global audiences to experience newly created Smoke Sculptures™ in Augmented Reality (AR).

Renowned American artist Judy Chicago’s first virtual artwork, commissioned by LAS, builds upon and continues her celebrated series Atmospheres (1968 – present). Global audiences are invited to experience this latest Smoke Sculpture™ performance in Augmented Reality (AR).

Chicago is a groundbreaking artist, author, feminist, educator and intellectual whose career spans five decades. She began her Atmospheres series in the late 1960s, working with pyrotechnics to produce complex firework pieces. Presented as ephemeral, site-specific performances, these works use coloured smoke intended to transform and soften the landscape. As an artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the physical experience of these works, Judy Chicago RainbowAR marks a new stage in Chicago’s long history with pyrotechnics, working with new AR technologies to push the boundaries of the medium.

Produced in close collaboration with LAS and experience designers International Magic, Chicago created a new form of her Smoke Sculptures™, which is now brought into the digital realm. During this uncertain time when public gatherings are limited and our relationships with personal and public spaces are changing, Judy Chicago RainbowAR is accessible to audiences wherever they are based, allowing them to have their own site-specific experience, activating and ‘beautifying’ their own surroundings.

‘This work is a new way to bring the experience of my Smoke Sculptures™ to audiences around the world who might not be familiar with my long-standing efforts to soften and feminise the often-harsh, patriarchal world around us. At this moment in time, it seems even more important to offer the opportunity to bathe our environments with light, art and beauty in order to inspire hope and through a visual metaphor, suggest the possibility of positive change.’

– Judy Chicago

Bringing individuals together through their experience of the work, Judy Chicago RainbowAR unfolds as an interactive performance, releasing plumes of smoke and changing colour. Curling and billowing across the viewers’ screens, the work will invite audiences to interact with the smoke, walking through or around it. Chicago conceived the scenography for the piece and chose the colours and sequencing to offer a unique experience of her smoke performances only possible in the virtual world. The experience is accompanied by a polyphonic soundtrack, realised in collaboration with sound designer Colin Bailey, which uses soundscapes made from recordings from Judy Chicago’s work with pyrotechnician Chris Souza, of Pyro Spectaculars.

Innovative new techniques were used to translate and simulate the aesthetic and unique behaviours of Chicago’s Smoke Sculptures™ inside Augmented Reality. International Magic used cutting-edge technologies including device motion, fluid smoke simulations, real-time particle systems, noise shaders and harmonic sound to create an authentic, interactive experience, unique to the viewer each time they enter the work.

Making-of Judy Chicago Rainbow AR

Rainbow AR

‘There was a moment when the smoke began to clear, but a haze lingered. And the whole world was feminised — if only for a moment.’

– Judy Chicago

Atmospheres (1968 – present)

Access Requirements

This application works best on modern devices with the latest software installed.

The devices supported are iPhone 8 and above, and Samsung Galaxy S8 or equivalent. The App requires a phone with a minimum of 4GB of memory and Apple iOS 11 or Android 8.0 Oreo (API 24) operating system.

Click here to view the Privacy Policy for Judy Chicago Rainbow AR.

Artist

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is an artist and author of fourteen books, which will be amplified by the 2021 publication by Thames and Hudson of "The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago" with an Introduction by Gloria Steinem. Her career spans almost six decades during which time she has produced a prodigious body of art that has been exhibited all over the world. In the 1970s, she pioneered Feminist art and feminist art education in a series of programmes in southern California. She is best known for her monumental work The Dinner Party, executed between 1974 and 1979, now permanently housed as the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

In 1977, Chicago founded Through the Flower, a non-profit art organisation that managed the overwhelming public support of The Dinner Party, which then toured internationally. It went on to sponsor, tour and permanently place the Birth Project and help to support the important Holocaust Project, created with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman. In addition to a number of institutional partnerships, Through the Flower now supports the TTF Art Space in Belen, New Mexico, an art and resource center aimed at continuing the organisation's goal of overcoming the erasure of women's cultural production.

Throughtheflower.org

[  judychicago.com  ]

Press

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Credits

© 2020 Judy Chicago ®
Smoke Sculptures™
Judy Chicago Rainbow AR
Commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS)
Experience produced by ​International Magic


Project Team

Artist
Judy Chicago
Head of Programmes
Amira Gad, LAS
Communications Assistant
Selin Şahin, LAS
Creative Director
Adam Rodgers, International Magic
Producer
Ben McKinnon, International Magic
Art Director
Agnete Morell, International Magic
Developer
Jonathan Landon, International Magic
Sound Designer
Colin Bailey, International Magic
Consultant
Noland Chaliha
Creative Consultant
Donald Woodman
Pyrotechnician Consultant
Chris Souza, Pyro Spectaculars
Chicago Woodman Studio LLC
Megan Schultz, Michael Apolo Gomez
Partners

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