As soon as they appeared on the market, tablets multiplied in museums, although they were generally relegated to specific museological uses. As a result of their development, however, there are a few artists, like Donald Abad, who seize them in order to augment art centres or galleries with virtual works. And
4. Relational Form
Augmented Reality
in the case of L’irresistible Ascension (2014), it is the work itself that can, or ought to be, augmented by the public who are equipped with tablets. For the work is presented in the form of a sculpture that is quite inert, which is to say a cairn placed on its plinth and evoking the stacks of stones of the land artists of the 1960s. It is only once it has been “scanned” by the tablets of the artist himself appears in the image of the cairn that he seems to want to climb. The stacked rocks then take on an entirely
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visitors, that it finally reveals itself by becoming animated. The
different dimension, while spectators, gathering around the few available shelves, comment on his “irresistible ascent”. The interactive relationship with the work increases therefore the relationship between the participants who exchange tablets. This, considering the writings of Sylvie Catellin, brings us back to the London exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity [21]: “One of the emergence of a relational aesthetic, or interactive aesthetics.” [22] Before referring to Frank Popper and adding the authors “no longer create a work, but rather contribute to the creation of a context, which enables us to establish aesthetic relations between different people and between different psychological and physical phenomena.” [23]
Dominique Moulon
great mutations introduced by cybernetic art was to elicit the