MICHAEL LEWY
Now more than ever.

Alpha 60

 

Alpha 60 is a science fiction augmented reality exhibition located in the Emerald Necklace in Boston, MA, using the Hoverlay AR app.
You can download the Hoverlay app for Iphone, Android.
Alpha 60 is supported by Boston Cyberarts and Hoverlay.
For a Google map to the artworks - click here.

Recent Press for Alpha 60 

The Artworks


Duty-Free Paradise Project at the Dole House by Lani Asuncion

This work is part of the Duty-Free Paradise (DFP) project focusing on the Dole House located in Jamaica Plain, MA. Home of the locally coined 'Pineapple King' who is known as the American industrialist who developed the pineapple industry in Hawaii. He established the Hawaiian Pineapple Company which was later reorganized to become the Dole Food Company. The Dole family was also involved in the 1898 coup that overthrew the Hawaiian Monarchy. A group of American sugar planters under Sanford Ballard Dole (James Dole's cousin) overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and established a new provincial government with Dole as president. Shortly after James Dole was given land to farm pineapples and create his unethically established company. Asuncion is creating connections between Hawaii and Boston's past and current American histories, and examining how they are being told and communicated by reframing them through digital media tools like video, augmented reality, and public performances. Their family migrated from the Philippines in 1920 to work in the sugar plantation in Kahuku, HI where her father and his siblings were born and raised.

Lani Asuncion (they/she) is a Boston-based multimedia artist who grew up in Waipahu on Oahu, Hawai’i and Okinawa, Japan, with roots in Appalachia. They have a performative social art practice in both public and private spaces using new media, sculpture, printmaking, video, and sound to create a visual language that comes from their identity as queer multicultural Filipinx-American. Asuncion's work aims to produce multifaceted anti-colonial work using technology as a tool to encourage conversations to create connections that aim to facilitate healing in the face of violence, oppression, and erasure. In conjunction with the DFP project, they are producing new augmented reality and performative work supported by the 2022 NEFA Public Art for Spatial Justice grant, Revolutionary AYAT around the Hiker Monuments (13 in Massachusetts and 50 throughout the U.S.) that addresses the Philippine-American War 1899 - 1902. They will continue to produce this work at the Studios at Mass MoCA next year as a Future Frequencies Fellowship (CreateWell Fund) through the Massachusetts Fellowship Residency Program.

The Future of Trees by Mathew Battles / Michael Lewy and Sound by Nsputnik.

 Through augmented reality, witness a world where trees must adapt to survive in our dystopian, smoke-filled future. Written and narrated by Mathew Battles. 

A Boston-based writer, Matthew Battles is the editor of Arnoldia, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Organism by Heather Beardsley

These sculptures are inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations, lithographs and drawings that blur the lines between art and science. Haeckel’s firm belief that all organisms were made up of structures that could be perfected through evolution caused him to exaggerate and idealize the organisms he represented. My work takes Haeckel’s embellishments one step further, exaggerating the stranger elements of his creations based on my own aesthetic preferences rather than scientific observation. Like Haeckel, my figures are inspired by plants, sea creatures and protists, and my unapologetic fabulation demonstrates what happens when ideology supersedes observations. My pieces are hand-sculpted using air-dry polymer coated with acrylic varnish to intentionally resemble 3D printed models in an attempt to borrow from the aura of objectivity that envelopes scientific illustration. 

Heather Beardsley (b. 1987) is creates mixed-media projects in response to environmental issues. Beardsley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She spent 2016 in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art, and in 2017, she was awarded a year-long Braunschweig Projects International Artist Fellowship by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Germany. Other residencies include KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna; Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing, China; IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv, Ukraine; and La Box in Bourges, France. Beardsley has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin, Museo del Traje in Madrid and Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands. In 2023 she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, while in summer 2024 she will have a solo exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and an art residency at Pier2 Art Center in Taiwan.

 Citizens of the Void Between Worlds by Tom Buckland

Tom has curated a selection of his favorite creatures, characters, and oddities drawn from the last decade of his artistic practice. Laika, hazmat suited strangers, looming genetically modified lifeforms, and augmented mechanical turtle men amongst many others are all waiting to meet you. 

Tom Buckland is an Australian visual artist who deals in a correspondence of imaginary worlds. With sculpture, performance, and video he creates work heavily influenced by his own fascination with science fiction and fantasy, topped off with a refined joyful absurdism. He also enjoys playing with audience interaction, taking much enjoyment in transporting his audience across space and time. Tom graduated from the Australian National University School of Art in 2015 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours in 2015. He currently resides in Canberra Australia. 

Planet of Glass by Chris Faust

The Emerald Necklace- the connected parks system in Boston designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, offers people a refuge from the concrete world of the city. The park system has been a restorative and reflective space available to all residents of the city of Boston and its surrounding communities since its beginnings in 1878.

In this piece, Planet of Glass, I wanted to use painting as a vehicle to access a parallel place within the alternate world Olmstead has created. In traditional landscape painting- in particular late 19th century Romantic painting- the canvas serves as a window onto nature- wild. Spiritual and sublime . My idea with this piece, and specifically working with AR, was to use this idea to create a portal to another place. The crystalline world I’ve created with a floating island and twin suns evokes the practical sets and matte paintings in SF classics such as Lost in Space, Star Wars and Forbidden Planet, as well as literary references like JG Ballard’s Crystal World and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I hope that viewers will see the piece not only through these historical and cultural lenses, but also as a transformative meditation on worlds beyond our own.

Power 2022 by Chris Faust

In this piece I imagine a confrontation not filled with fear but with familiarity- the realization that this tentacled monster, menacingly floating in the air above her- may not need to be feared after all.

In much of my work I am using my love of science fiction and fantasy as a platform to explore ideas around parenting. I follow a vague narrative set in a world that is old and impenetrable, teeming with the residue of magic and ancient gods- where monsters roam in a sort of haunted scifi romanticism.

There, a child wanders, discovers, and battles her way into adulthood- learning what to trust and what to be wary of. My work is a way of envisioning a fearless outlook for my daughter as she navigates a sometimes dangerous, but more often beautiful and strange world.

Chris Faust received his BFA from MassArt in 1989 and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2013. He is a 1997 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant and a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Painting Fellowship recipient. He is represented by bkprojects in Watertown. Chris lives in Newton and is a full-time arts faculty member at Medfield High School in Medfield, MA where he teaches digital media.

Oculus by Judy Haberl

Moments of magic occur in unexpected places. A daily task transcends the ordinary. Cooking egg whites in a cast-iron pan transformed an otherwise banal moment into a visual phenomenon, becoming a mesmerizing, ever – changing moon.

Judy Haberl (Newton, MA) Received her BA from University of Northern Colorado and her MFA in Painting and Installation from Tufts/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She merges the disciplines of sculpture, photography, printmaking and installation, with a deep interest in the evocative potential and history of objects within a culture. She is a co-founder of Claflin School Studios, a 17 unit live-work studio building in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a Professor Emeritus of Massachusetts College of Art & Design.

She is the recipient of awards and grants including - The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University, Grants from - LEF New England, General Fund Visual Artist Award, Artist's Resource Trust grants; Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and Massachusetts College of Art Faculty Fellowships. She is represented in Boston by Gallery Kayafas.

Her exhibitions include: The ICA, Boston, Houston Center for Photography (HCP), Houston, TX, United Photo Industries, The Fence, Brooklyn, NY, Snug Harbor Cultural Center N.Y, The Pelham Art Center, NY, Stux Gallery, NY, A.I.R. Gallery, NYC, The M.A.C. Center, Dallas, REDLINE, Denver, Colorado, De Santos Gallery, Houston, TX, Cultural Center, Havana Cuba, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, The Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, Fotofest, Houston, TX, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA.

An Island by Carol Hayes

When I envisioned this piece, I wanted it to possess fairytale qualities (inspired by the 1981 song “Land of the Glass Pinecones,” by the Boston band Human Sexual Response): sharp and crystalline with glittery pine trees and sparkly palm fronds. But the further I progressed in making it, the more it started to resemble a Christmas-y winter wonderland. I had to put a stop to that. I changed direction, opting for a multi-colored island oasis, an unexpected juxtaposition with the New England landscape of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Carol Hayes is an artist and designer who lives in Brooklyn NY.

Contact Point by Heather Kapplow

Contact Point is a site-specific, geo-located, alternate reality sound-and-sugar piece, hovering at a place that was visible from Kapplow’s bedroom window as a child, and where a violent and surreal event involving a raft of ducks was once witnessed. The event occurred during a time period when Kapplow was extremely concerned about the possibility of being a “Star Person” (an alien-human hybrid species posited by New Age authors Brad and Francie Steiger).

Contact Point’s audio features the voices of several autonomous solar-powered "sounder" devices collectively produced in a workshop led by Daniel Fishkin in Aarhus, DK in August 2021.

Heather Kapplow (www.heather.kapplow.com) is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. Kapplow creates participatory experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Kapplow's work has received government and private grants and has been included in galleries, film and performance festivals in the US and internationally.

Raree Show by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick 

For Alpha 60 - we placed two pieces (From the Oraculum, the Augury of Soma, when “the truth of a fleeting moment becomes writ large on the face of eternity.” and Greenman Dance. Music by Cloudshoes Honk Orchestra) in a digital recreation of a 19th-century peep show box or Raree show box. The work can be seen using the Hoverlay app and is located in the pine bank manor site at Jamaica Pond, Boston. 

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist team who have been working together since they met while attending art school at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1980s. Both were born in 1964, in New York City and London respectively. They work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. These may include: documentary-style panoramic and square photographs that combine absurdist fantasy and bogus anthropology; elaborately crafted artifacts, costumes and sculpture, often constructed of unlikely materials such as bread or fur, painting and drawings ranging from large scale works on plaster to pages of conceptual doodling. Kahn lives in Ghent NY, and Selesnick in Rhinebeck NY.

Daimon Transposers by Alessandro Keegan

My oil paintings and colored pencil drawings of crystalline orbs and geometric shapes are created to house inside them the intangible essence of the invisible world that surrounds us. With subtle but varied colors, ambiguous spaces, schematic lines, transparent teardrops, and cellular blobs, my paintings slip around the definitions of abstract and representational art. These paintings are bodies to be occupied by a disembodied being, architecture to be lived in by a being that will never have a form.

The inspiration for painting worlds that are built for incorporeal entities arrived for me in the psychedelic experiences of my youth. Later in life, more images and information came to me through visions received in meditation. While working as a diamond grader at the Gemological Institute of America in New York many years ago, the thought first came to me that just as light can live inside of something as physical as a gemstone, so too can spiritual beings, energies, and forces from outside of space and time, beam themselves into the material bodies of our more solidified world. Gemstone-like forms became one of the dominant characteristics in my work.

In this century, as more and more of our lives are lived through technology, in a bodiless, virtual space, the idea that we are spirits in the material world seems less far-fetched. Though my paintings do not address this contemporary condition directly, the glassy lens shapes and jeweled eyes that drift over endless gradient skies are next of kin to the soon-to-be hybridization of the human body with post-physical consciousness. It seems natural, given this close relationship that my work has with the disembodied experiences of the electrically networked age, that my forms may find themselves in the hybrid landscape of augmented reality. 

Alessandro Keegan (b. 1980) is a visual artist, writer, and adjunct professor with an MFA in painting and drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MA in art history from Brooklyn College. His paintings and drawings, which depict forms that straddle the lines between science, nature, technology, and mysticism, have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, London and The Hague. Writings about his work have appeared in Artforum, Elephant Magazine, Masthead Magazine and Ephemera NYC as well as journals such as Helvete (Punctum Books, Brooklyn) and J’ai Froid (Castillo/ Corrales, Paris). Keegan’s art practice and ideas are the subject of a short documentary film called “The Matter of Mind”, released in 2020 by Full Moon Films. He currently lives and works in Walden, NY.

Magnolia-Leaf-Boulder by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

For their first AR Project, the McCoys produced a live collage for the Arnold Arboretum in which viewers can see the current garden as a part of a "speculative garden".   Moving image and cut paper abstractions are juxtaposed with 3D plants that will be eventually indigenous to Boston in the next century as climate change proceeds.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are media artists whose works extends from the moving image and software to drawing, painting, and installation. Their projects often seek to situate new technologies within our culture, using contemporary tools and questioning their impact both on the individual and on society. The McCoys' work can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  They received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.

Beta 64 by Michael Lewy and Music by Nsputnik

Inspired by the movie Alphaville and the time machine from Je t'aime Je t'aime. Lewy has created a multi episodic augmented reality narrative. Beta 64 tells the story of an alien supercomputer who has taken over society and banished all art and poetry and turned all the artists into monsters.

Monstrum Plantae by Michael Lewy 

Inspired by the 1962 science fiction film The Day of the Triffids, Lewy presents Monstrum Plantae—an augmented reality artwork created specifically for the Arnold Arboretum. Combining classic stop-motion animation with contemporary augmented reality, this piece delves into the enduring theme of man versus nature, envisioning a world where plants have overtaken the planet.

Michael Lewy is an artist based in Boston. He works in a variety of media, including augmented reality, virtual reality, photography, and video. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of powerpoint charts, and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. 
(The Voice of Beta 64 is kindly provided by Matthew Battles, Hazel Lewy, Richard Nash, Liz Nofziger, Richard Saja, Jessamyn West)

The Compost Series by Lauren Moffatt 

The Compost series explores forms of deceleration and regeneration using technologies from video games. The creation of these works follows a creative process made up of accidents and dialogues with machines. Her customised practice of photogrammetry consists of working with a reduced number of photos, varying focal lengths, photographing subjects too closely, or provoking deliberate errors by photographing moving subjects. The textures are then physically painted and the points retouched in a 3D editing software and the disparate meshes are subsequently assembled into a spatial collage and animated. By creating a digital strangeness and effects combining the sublime and digital decay, the Compost assemblages recreate forms which are alive with indetermination and unpredictability.

Lauren Moffatt is an Australian artist working with immersive environments and experimental narrative practices. Her works, often presented in hybrid and iterative forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the indistinct boundaries between digital and organic life. She uses a combination of conventional, outdated, and pioneering technologies to create universes that span between physical and virtual space. Lauren's works have been exhibited most recently at Sonar (ES), Matadero Madrid (ES), Haus am Lützowplatz (DE), La Gaïté Lyrique (FR), SXSW (US), UNSW Galleries (AU), Daegu Art Museum (KOR), Le Grand Palais Ephémère (FR), SAVVY Contemporary (DE), FACT Liverpool (UK) The Sundance Film Festival (US) ZKM (DE), Q21 Freiraum (AT) and at Hartware MedienkunstVerein (DE).  Lauren lives and works in Valencia (ES). 

Very Simple by Liz Nofziger

Nofziger surrounds you in a ring of text extracted from Godard’s Alphaville — a film set in a dystopian city ruled by a tyrannical machine who barrs free speech and free thought. A small storm of thrashing magnetic tape writhes around in the circle with you as you’re immersed in the crackle and hum of a needle on a record, sampled from a recording of the LP "Dance Hall of Shame," a silent record released by Virgin Records protesting censorship in music in 1990.

Liz Nofziger is a site-specific installation artist whose work examines relationships to space within the physical, architectural, political, and pop-cultural landscape. Employing a broad range of media including video, sculpture, light, audio, found material and text, viewer investigation often completes her work. Nofziger received her MFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. She currently teaches at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.

Interloper by Liz Nofziger

A new resident has made its home in the abandoned bear pens at Franklin Park. Approach with caution.

Tail, Pudding Stone, and Wooden Accountant/Actor by Tony Oursler

The enchanted forest is a refuge for our imagination.” States Tony Oursler.  Inspired by ecological scientific and mythological themes such as anti evolution propaganda, the medieval  Wild Woman, the Garden of Eden , a sketch of the tree of life by Charles Darwin representing his evolutionary theory, as well as the new DNA technology CRISPR-Cas9 he creates a dynamic three part  AR installation. Roughly 1/3 of the American public does not believe in the theory of evolution, and many denied climate change, while a new age back-to-nature movement gathers force Oursler suggests our ever changing relationship to nature as the center of conflicting world views. A cast of Oursler's characters come to life with AR,  inviting the viewer to reconsider magical thinking and their own position within the balance of technology and the biosphere as they move through the park.  Pudding Stone, Wooden Accountant/Actor and Tail were conceived and produced specially for Alpha 60 and features  performances by Joe Gibbons, Joy Matter and Shelly Valfer, .

Tony Oursler (American, b.1957) is a multimedia and installation artist. Born in Manhattan, he attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he completed his BA in 1979. In the early 1980s, Oursler returned to the East Coast, and eventually opened his own studio in New York City. Through the 1970-80’s he produced single channel video tapes, as well as large scale, immersive video installations. In the 1990s while teaching at Massachusetts College of Art, Oursler "freed video from the box" by producing video effigies, dolls and dummies with the then new technology of micro LCD projectors. Beginning with Influence Machine in 2000 Oursler produced a series of ongoing large scale, permanent and temporary outdoor projection projects, incorporating buildings, trees, and other natural features such as water as projection screens. Known for his mass-media-inspired and systems of belief , Oursler explores the psychological and social relationships between individuals and visual technologies. Applying humor and irony to his wide range of work, which has included moving image, painting, installation, performance, and sculpture, Oursler elevates and reframes everyday activities and object above the mundane inviting the viewer to experience their impact on contemporary culture. As his art has progressed, Oursler repeatedly questions visual technologies’ affect on the way we view the world, magical thinking and how images are construed for public consumption. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, Bernier/Eliades and Lehmann Maupin.

Oursler has had more than a 100 solo exhibitions around the world. His works have been exhibited at the The Museum of Modern Art, the LUMA foundation Zurich, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. LA MOCA, the Whitney Museum of American Art,  MACRO Rome, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; documenta VIII, IX, Kassel, Germany; ; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the D.O.P. Foundation, Caracas, Venezuela; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Skulptur Projekte Münster; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; ; the Tate, London and Liverpool, UK.

Awkward Instance by Will Pappenheimer

Awkward Instance represents one of a number of paranormal apparitions which take on dancing distorted human forms. These beings have stolen both human skins and human motion capture sequences but have not quite put them back together properly. Hence the mismatch can also be understood as a “glitch,” which is a contemporary reference to digital processes that are unintentionally or intentionally scrambled to reveal interesting aesthetic or sensory results. Glitches are also understood as a sign of the limitations of utopian computer oriented ideals and their cultural implications. The strange choreography of Awkward Instance also reflects the estrangement we might feel inhabiting our own bodies, though in this case the paranormal entity uses these altered movements as a method for hypnotizing their audiences into sympathetic compliance.

Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn based artist and educator working in new media, performance and installation. His current work explores the collage of the virtual and physical worlds in the recent medium of augmented or mixed reality. His projects and performances have been shown internationally at Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum and the Moving Image Art Fair in New York; LACMA and Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles; San Francisco MOMA; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul; the ICA, CyberArts Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. He recently debuted a solo show of new at the Alpha Gallery in Boston. His works have been reviewed in the Whitney Museum curator, Christiane Paulʼs historical editions of “Digital Art,” Art in America, New York Times, Hyperallergic.org, WIRED, the Boston Globe, and EL PAIS, Madrid. A documentary on his work is as part of Bloomberg TV’s Art + Technology series.  

Hoverbikes by Eric Sutton
Travel transports us to different cultures and helps us to see our own world with fresh eyes. These images from the other side of the globe have been altered enough to make them feel futuristic and otherworldly– yet it’s the everyday scenes of humanity that’s most compelling and universal

Eric Sutton is an advertising Creative Director with a passion for art. He studied printmaking and interactive design at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and continued to create personal work during his marketing career. After traveling in Vietnam with his family, a series of work about the motorbike culture there emerged.

FIELDS: a haiku by Richard Saja and Sound Design by Nsputnik

Somnambulistic, a dark herd lumbers on, wakes and is hungry

Richard Saja is an artist making work in Catskill, New York. After first attending the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to study surface design, he devoted his studies to the great books of Western Civilization at St Johns College in Santa Fe, NM and received a BA as a math and philosophy major. After a brief stint working as an art director on Madison Ave., all his interests coalesced and a small design firm, Historically Inaccurate Decorative Arts, was born in the early aughts.

Though he occasionally feels the need to explore avenues of expression beyond that of the needle, the majority of Saja's work focuses on creating "interferences" of the formal patterns of french toile through embroidery.

He has exhibited internationally with shows in New York, Paris, London and Berlin and the National Museum of Embroidery in South Korea and his work has recently been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Toile de Jouy Museum in Josas, France.

Water Lily Invasion (2013) by Tamiko Thiel

As global water levels and temperatures rise, plants and animals are mutating to adapt. Strange new creatures are arising at the interstices between plant and animal, questioning and transgressing the boundaries between reactive flora and active fauna. 

Water lilies are beautiful but also aggressively invasive plants. In 2013, a colony of mutant water lilies was first observed to be rapidly spreading  around the world. These mutants, only visible through AR mobile apps, are sensitive to the mediated human gaze: a seemingly small, innocuous water lily can enlarge to engulf viewers who approach it too closely while viewing it in the displays of their mobiles. It is hypothesized that it feeds off energy emanating from these electronic devices. Until now viewers have reported feeling no effects themselves, other than a temporary fibrillation. Scientists worry however that future mutations could cross boundaries between a sessile but sentient plant and a more active, potentially even carnivorous, life form.

Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award for now over 35 years of politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity. She began her career as lead project design engineer of Danny Hillis‘ Connection Machine CM1/CM2 artificial intelligence supercomputers from 1986 & 1987, which she got into the collection of MoMA NY 30 years later. She began working with virtual reality (VR) as producer & creative director on Starbright World, the first metaverse for children, in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her own VR large projection interactive installation Beyond Manzanar was the first VR artwork acquired by a US art museum when it was bought in 2002 by the San Jose Museum of Art. She began working in augmented reality (AR) art with ARt Critic Face Matrix, a work in the pathbreaking AR intervention into MoMA NY „We AR in MoMA“ in 2010. Her AR art commissions include Unexpected Growth in 2018 for the Whitney Museum New York (now in the collection), ReWildARfor the Smithsonian Institution’s 175th anniversary in 2021, and Vera Plastica for the BROICH Digital Art Museum exhibit „À la Recherche de Vera Molnar“ at the Ludwig Museum Budapest in 2024.

Monopters at the Gate by Chris Rackley

For Alpha60, Rackley opens a portal leading to a distant region of the galaxy. Just past the hyperdimensional threshold, a group of entities is watching. These creatures are digital animations of oil paintings Rackley made of one-eyed beings known as Monopters. Are they individuals or a hive mind? Why are they watching us so closely?

Chris Rackley is an American visual artist based in Rochester, MN who works in a variety of modes including drawing, painting, miniature sculpture, video, and interactive installation. Rackley’s work plays with the connection between facades and hidden realities and explores his interests in science fiction films, special-effects production, and the bizarre world of quantum physics wriggling underneath everything. Rackley received his BA in Studio Art from Davidson College and his MFA in Painting from George Mason University. Rackley’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally, and internationally. Rackley’s awards include a 2020 grant from Springboard for the Arts, a 2019 Art(ists) On the Verge Fellowship and a 2018 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Plukanain Poem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

In 1986, Georgian-Russian director Georgiy Daneliya created a rough gem of a sci-fi film in which two strangers press the wrong button on an alien device and end up in another world: the desert planet Pluke in the galaxy of Kin-dza-dza. On Pluke, the deserts were once seas, but the water was greedily converted into engine fuel. Now the only way to collect drinking water is to extract it back from that fuel.

The strangers meet two performers on Pluke who speak only Plukanian (largely consisting of the word ‘koo’.) The strangers try to negotiate a rescue mission with the performers, and soon discover they have something valuable to Plukanians: matches. All four join forces in a broken-down spaceship to get back to Earth, but on their journey, the strangers find that the whole planet is follows a crude caste system, and the economy is based on free-for-all bartering. Film critic Joel Blackledge of the blog, “Little White Lies” describes the film as having a "salvage punk aesthetic…[it’s] Mad Max meets Monty Python by way of Tarkovsky.”

For this collaboration, Michael Lewy (AR artist) and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (poet) create a scenario in which the viewer is invited into the strangers’ spaceship by a nebulous Plukanain voice, reciting a series of sentences in Plukanian that strike a chord poetically and perhaps politically at a time in which global climate change and socioeconomic disparity have made a fateful impact on our current state. To read more about the film visit “Little White Lies". To access a Plukanian dictionary, visit Wikipedia.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas is a Lithuanian-Canadian-American poet / cinepoet. Her work has placed in international video poetry festivals including the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival (Canada); the Vienna Art Visuals & Video Poetry Film Festival; the International Video Poetry Festival (Greece); Artlitlab's Midwest Video Poetry Festival (US); the Ontario College of Art & Design University's exhibit, "Private Lives"; Festival Fotogenia (Mexico City); and the Newlyn Film Festival (UK). Her collection of cinepoems based upon her chapbook, White Stockings, was a collaboration with visual artist Tess Cortés and were screened at the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Conference at Stanford University. In 2020, she received a PEN America Relief Grant.

In 2019, she published an essay in an anthology dedicated to the poetry of Lithuanian filmmaker and Anthology Film Archives founder, Jonas Mekas (Brooklyn Rail). She also performed voice-over narration in the independent documentary film, George: The Story of George Mačiunas & Fluxus, directed by Fluxus member Jeffrey Perkins, and features Yoko Ono. The documentary has been screened at MoMA as well as in Amsterdam, London, and Vilnius.

Restless Object by Ashley Eliza Williams

“Restless Object” is an image of an oil painting of a lichen-covered form suspended in virtual space. All across the world, landscapes, animals, and people are forced to migrate because of climate change and habitat loss. Through this series of paintings, photographs, and AR experiences, I explore the stories of these ecological migrations and the challenges faced by beings that must undergo these journeys.

All of my work is a series of “communication attempts.” Relationships between paintings, between objects, and between the work and the viewer are inspired by interspecies communication, conversations between living and non-living things, and a desire to mitigate ecological and human loneliness. How fully can we understand a cloud, a tree, or a rock? Can we develop a vocabulary that enables us to do that?

What does our desire to engage with the non-human tell us about ourselves? My central goal as an artist is to discover alternative, more empathic ways of interacting with nature and with each other. Short

Ashley Eliza Williams is a painter, sculptor, and multimedia artist based in Western Massachusetts.

Worlds End By T Buckland / M. Lewy

Is a combined work that takes its inspiration from Planet of the Apes and the SciFi trope of the derelict graveyard.